Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath

by Steven Goldman

  As I sit in class mentally calculating how many more hours of Curtis’s lecturing I still have to endure—less than fifty, if I’m doing the math correctly—I begin to sense that something is wrong. Curtis is talking, nothing unusual there, but his voice seems flatter, less animated, as if he no longer cares about whether or not we are listening. He is almost mumbling, reading aloud occasionally from his well-worn copy of O Pioneers! sitting on his stool at the front of the room, which is unusual in itself, as he usually paces while he reads. The board is nearly blank. Last Friday’s date still sits in the far left corner. There are a few halfhearted attempts to write a word or two, none of the usual illegible scrawl he haphazardly fills the board with as he writes furiously with one hand, holding the book in the other and never stopping the rush of words for so much as a breath. Today there are pauses. He has not asked one rhetorical question. In fact, he has asked no questions at all.

  I look around furtively to see if anyone else has noticed the change. If anyone has, it is hard to tell. Several people are still taking notes, on Lord knows what, because Curtis has barely said anything about the reading. The same one or two students who always sleep through the class have their heads down in their customary hunched positions. The rest of the class sit in their usual semidazed state.

  The pauses grow longer. Curtis reads, then pauses, says a few words, then pauses again, as if he is testing whether there is a difference between the pauses and the talking. And then, unostentatiously, he closes the book and walks out of the room.

  At first, no one speaks. The heads that are down on the desktops remain there; the more alert students look around nervously. Mariel stops taking notes.

  “Maybe he needs to take a leak,” suggests Louis. No one laughs.

  We sit in silence for over a minute. I time it on my watch. Then Bonnie and Anna, who sit in the far side back corner, start to whisper, pulling their desks closer together. Slowly small clumps of conversation sprout across the room, and eventually people find their normal speaking voices. David doesn’t move from his spot, third row, third seat in, and he becomes an island as the neat lines of desks form loose constellations of social organization. He fidgets with his pencils. I pretend to be part of the conversation taking place directly to my left, about a movie I hadn’t seen. My one contribution is that I had heard it was good. At 9:05, when class officially ends, everyone gets up and leaves.

  “What was the last thing he said?” I ask David as we shuffle down the hallway to calculus.

  “I wasn’t really listening,” David admits with what sounds like regret.

  “I don’t think anyone was.”

  “Should we tell someone?”

  “Report Curtis AWOL? I don’t want to get him in trouble. Maybe he had a breakdown, like Ms.—what was the name of the woman who we had in seventh-grade Latin?”

  “Ms. Hertig.”

  “Like Ms. Hertig.”

  David shakes his head. “She started out weirder than Curtis. Curtis is strange, but not psycho. And she didn’t walk out of class, she broke into hysterics and threw a chair at Louis.”

  Theory 1: A man walks into a bar …

  Mariel, of course, has the full story by break.

  “He just walked out of school, got in his car, and drove away. They found his copy of O Pioneers! in the parking lot.”

  “Does anybody know why?”

  Mariel grins. “It’s a mystery, but the prevailing theory is that some trustee spotted Curtis coming out of Riley’s.”

  Riley’s is the best-known, and possibly only, gay bar in town.

  “They can’t fire a guy for going into a bar, not even Riley’s.”

  “Even if it was on a school night,” adds David.

  “Was that a joke?” Mariel asks. “I could have sworn you lacked the gene for sarcasm.”

  David almost smiles. “I never joke,” he replies solemnly.

  Mariel spots someone else she needs to tell the story to and walks away. I have to ask David.

  “Do you really think Curtis is gay?”

  He readjusts his glasses, a clear signal that he’s annoyed. “Why would I know?”

  On Tuesday, we have a substitute English teacher who clearly has not read O Pioneers! and tries to engage us in a discussion of William Catheter’s work. She isn’t much older than we are. My guess is that she was student-teaching somewhere and got shuffled into this slot at the last minute. She seems intimidated. This is new to us. Honors English classes are rarely seen as frightening.

  “I’m an early childhood specialist,” she confesses about halfway through the period in a desperate attempt to elicit some sympathetic response. Her styled hair, manicured nails, and short tight skirt are, however, more interesting than anything she has to say. The sub has pulled one of the student desks forward to face the class, and she keeps tugging at that skirt as if it might suddenly grow larger, which would have been useful, as it barely covers her thighs. Every time she shifts her legs, she offers glimpses of her pale blue panties. I don’t think I’m the only one who notices this. Several males in the classroom seem unusually attentive.

  On Wednesday, Ms. Blue Panties has mysteriously disappeared, replaced by a youngish bearded guy wearing a tie and Vans. It is as if they’re sending us stereotypes of bad teachers. Every other sentence ends with a rhetorical “Right?” Example: “Cather is really challenging our preconceived notions of femininity, right?” I have visions of the class chanting “Right!” in response, amen-style, but of course no one says anything. After seventeen or eighteen rhetorical “rights?” the sub finally asks, “Has anyone read any of this?” No one answers. The few who have actually done the assigned reading aren’t about to admit to it. He looks disappointed, then brightens up. “So what music do you guys listen to? Anybody into Animal Collective?”

  I am beginning to miss Curtis.

  On Thursday, I am summoned to the principal’s office.

  Saying I was summoned to the Director of the Upper Division’s office just doesn’t have the same ring

  I have never been in trouble before. I can’t remember ever even being sent to sit in the hall, or having a teacher raise their voice at me. This is my fourteenth year at Richard White Day School; I started in preK. Thirteen and a half years of reasonably good behavior. I don’t know how to react.

  We don’t actually have a principal—at least not by that title. Some consultant had been hired two years ago to reorganize Richard White Day to reflect the reality of the business climate of small expensive private schools, and now everyone has pseudo-corporate titles that look nice on their business cards. There are no deans or headmasters in this progressive institution. Instead, we have a CEO, Dr. VandeNeer, whom we see at assemblies twice a year and on brochures. His primary job seems to be schmoozing with donors and bringing in the bucks. He must be doing pretty well since every room, every hallway, even some of the larger windows have neat little plaques with someone’s name on them. I often drink from the J. P. Gilley water fountain, which happens to be near my locker. Louis suggested giving a new urinal as our class gift so we could have a plaque in the john.

  The business manager has become a CFO (Chief Financial Officer), although everybody still calls him the BM, just not to his face. Most of the other administrators have become directors: Director of the Lower Grades, Director of the Middle Grades, Directors of Admissions, Publications, Academic Computing, Media Center, and even Student Services (formerly the janitors and kitchen crew). Teachers are still teachers and, as far as I know, we are still officially designated students, not yet products in need of bar coding.

  So I’m not summoned to the principal’s office. I am summoned to the Director of the Upper Division’s office. We call him Mr. Sorrelson.

  Mr. Sorrelson is nice enough most of the time, but he has a reputation for losing his temper easily and having an intimidating presence. I come in already intimidated. He is in his early fifties and was brought to White Day when the board decided that the forme
r headmaster had been too liberal and, well … nice. We needed more discipline or something, and Sorrelson was supposed to be a hard-ass. He plays the role pretty well. He has a large head with scattered white strands of hair on top and a droopy chin below. The rest of him isn’t as large, except for his belly, which protrudes forward like he’s very pregnant. His lower lip sticks out when he’s riled, his jaw set in an angry grimace. His lip is out when I enter the room.

  Mr. Sorrelson sits behind an imposing wooden desk that almost entirely fills his tiny office. Lord knows how they got the thing in there. Since there isn’t enough room to place it on the far wall, the desk faces the adjacent wall. As a consequence, to anyone passing by, Sorrelson is always in profile. The desk is immaculate, no spare paper clips, no loose papers, only a small three-tiered plastic inbox and a telephone on three yards of brightly polished wood. Two small plastic chairs are wedged in between the far side of the desk and the wall.

  “Please sit down, Mitchell,” Mr. Sorrelson barks. Barking “please” is one of the things that make people like Mr. Sorrelson seem intimidating. I sit down.

  “Do you know why I have asked you to come to my office?”

  I want to answer, “No, don’t you?” but I don’t. I hate this question. Maybe he is hoping I’ll admit to doing something he doesn’t know about yet, like drug-dealing or beating up freshmen or something.

  “No,” I finally say.

  Mr. Sorrelson tugs on his lower lip thoughtfully, as if he is still deciding what it is that I have done. I can feel the blood rushing in my ears, that odd pseudo-heartbeat you get when you’re nervous. I’m nervous.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you turned in a video, a cartoon or something, for your last English project.” It takes him a good ten seconds to get this line out. He clears his throat twice and makes odd clicking noises with his tongue as he speaks, as if there is too much moisture in his mouth. It comes out more like “Correct (uhem) me (slurp) if I’m (ich) wrong (uhem), but (ich) I be (ych) lieve (sluurrll).” At least he doesn’t drool. I can only imagine that he considers this long drawn-out method of communicating a nifty way of heightening the tension.

  “Yeah.”

  “And I suppose you thought that this little cartoon of yours was funny. A real joke.”

  I nod. I did. “Parts of it were intended to be humorous,” I suggest somewhat lamely. “It was supposed to be a visual interpretation of biblical themes in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.”

  “I know who wrote The Grapes of Wrath,” Sorrelson intones, as if he had caught Steinbeck earlier and already punished him for it. He stares at me, knitting his unruly white eyebrows together. “Had it occurred to you at any point in this process that someone might find this little cartoon of yours …” He pauses and looks at the ceiling for a moment, as if he needs to summon the next word from above, and then with sudden fury he discovers it among the fluorescent lights and, lowering his gaze, he spits it at me: “…offensive?!?!”

  I panic. “No. I mean, I knew that there was a little nudity, but it isn’t very explicit and they are made out of clay, I mean they don’t look like people, they look more like those little Fisher-Price figures, except Eve has breasts but you wouldn’t know they were breasts except that they’re round and where breasts should be, but if they weren’t there you would think that they were … little tiny half-grapefruits or something, but really tiny, so I didn’t think anyone would be too upset by little toylike naked clay things, oh, except for the dancing Steinbeck, which is a naked Ken doll, but they aren’t anatomically correct anyway …” I run out of steam. Mr. Sorrelson is staring at me quizzically.

  “There was nudity? No one said anything about nudity.”

  Crap.

  “Well,” continues Mr. Sorrelson, who now seems a bit flustered, which has the advantage of making him talk more quickly. “The issue wasn’t about the nudity, but we’ll come back to that later. I have received several complaints from quite a few families …”

  There is something in the way he says “quite a few” that makes me question the claim. How many people need to call to constitute “quite a few”?

  Sorrelson takes a deep breath and continues in a tone that almost sounds confidential. “We had a few calls saying that your cartoon was a parody of the Bible and was inappropriate to show to a class that includes people of deep religious conviction.”

  “Oh.”

  “Was that your intention?”

  “To make fun of somebody’s religion? No.”

  “Do you see how someone might interpret your cartoon this way?”

  “Maybe.” I’m biting the inside of my lip and thinking through the sequences. You’d have to be pretty damn sensitive.

  “I think the best thing would be for you to bring the DVD in and let me watch it, and we will continue from there. In the meantime, I will call your parents and inform them of our discussion today. I assume that they have seen your cartoon.” He is back to talking slowly.

  I shake my head.

  “Perhaps you may wish to show it to them before you bring it to me. Do you have anything else to say?”

  I shake my head again.

  “Then you may return to your class.”

  “Thanks,” I say, although I’m not sure why I’m thanking him for this unpleasant experience.

  Mom loves the film. Dad, who actually likes Steinbeck, thinks it’s a bit harsh, but makes several encouraging comments about technical features, such as the melting figures in the dust bowl and the flying monkey sequence. Carrie tells me that it’s better the second time, but it’s still gross. We eat popcorn. I can’t imagine this is what Mr. Sorrelson had envisioned when he told me to show the “cartoon” to my parents.

  CHAPTER 14

  Oncoming Trains and a Large Variety of Similarly Strained Metaphors

  Butterflies, bondage, and balloons

  I miss David,” Carrie says as she stands with me and M.C. waiting for Mom to pick us up.

  “You miss his car.”

  Baseball season is in full swing. David has retrieved his glove from underneath his mattress, where it had hibernated all winter wrapped around a baseball. It was a little like watching a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis, only a lot less picturesque. Suddenly there were lots of very important conversations he had to have with teammates he’d barely spoken to in the off-season. And suddenly our designated chauffeur became much less available.

  Sometimes I drive when Mom doesn’t need the car. Other times we have to wait for Mom to pick us up. Mom is always late, so not only do we not get to drive ourselves home, but we have to stand around watching everyone else leave, knowing that when they look out the window of their various sports utility vehicles and occasional secondhand wrecks they see supposed high school students pathetically waiting for their mommy to pick them up. For Carrie, it is slow torture, even worse than having to ride home with me in the minivan.

  “Do you think,” M.C. says, staring out at the pond, “that when we’re old, we’ll remember anything about high school? How much does it matter? As long as we make it to college, will anything that’s happening now even be important to us in ten years?”

  “How long is baseball season?” Carrie asks.

  “All spring,” I answer.

  M.C. is in melancholy. Maybe she’s missing Curtis. “You know,” she says in a low monotone, “everything we care about now—grades, hair, boys—when we leave here, we won’t give a crap about any of it.”

  “I’ll still care about my hair,” Carrie says. “And boys will be men then and we’ll probably care about them about as much as we do now.”

  “But differently, you know?”

  The three of us are now the only ones left in the pickup area. Carrie is pacing the road. I give up and go sit on one of the benches. It may be baseball season, but it’s unseasonably chilly. I dig my hands into my jacket pockets.

  M.C. sits next to me and we don’t say anything for way too long. I am in my own funk. This
morning I dropped off my movie with Sorrelson’s administrative assistant, who gave me the kind of thin smile you give someone who you don’t quite trust but are trying to placate into going away as quickly as possible. She held the sides of the case as if it were contaminated and said a simple “Thank you” in response. I waited for too long thinking I was supposed to receive some sort of instructions, but she just repeated “Thank you” and smiled again, and I left. I’m assuming Sorrelson will let me know my fate sometime soon. I feel like one of those cartoon heroines tied to a track watching a very slow train coming to run me over. A very, very slow train.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask M.C.

  “Ice cream.”

  “It’s freezing.”

  “We don’t have to eat it outside.”

  “But in ten years …”

  “I’ll still want ice cream.”

  We convince Mom to let us drop her off at home, and the three of us go out to the mall for ice cream. I know I’m transportation, not company, but M.C. has cheered up and Carrie’s not being any more obnoxious than usual.

  M.C. orders a banana split with everything. I have one scoop of chocolate ice cream with pineapple topping. Carrie orders a Diet Coke.

  I have never seen anyone devour a banana split the way that M.C. does. If we came here to change her mood, it’s worked. M.C. is a frenzy of eating. She digs straight into the middle, where the chocolate sauce is melting into the ice cream and pulls large spoonfuls out, slurping them down with gleeful abandon. She picks up the banana slices with her fingers, leaving a trail of drips on the table, on her shirt, on her chin. She has ice cream in her hair. She unself-consciously licks the splattered whipped cream off the back of her hand and smiles at me.

  “Don’t you love banana splits?”

  The door of the restaurant opens. Carrie looks up and then away, pretending that she didn’t see who came in. Ryan, Danielle, Nicole, and some guy I don’t know are standing at the door. M.C. turns around in her chair to see who Carrie is so carefully ignoring and all of her happy energy drains away. It’s like watching a balloon deflate. She spins back around and grabs a napkin. As the foursome walks past us to find a table, we sit absolutely silent, as if maybe we are invisible and if we don’t say anything they won’t notice we are here. Of the four, only Danielle seems a little awkward about completely snubbing us; she gives us a little “Hi guys,” and a wave. “Hi,” I answer, and maybe there’s a nod from Ryan. They settle into a table on the other side of a line of booths.