The words “shame-humiliation” and “contempt-disgust” sounded foreign, like poetry, in Danielle’s mouth. Danielle was a human being, and so of course must have experienced shame, humiliation, contempt, disgust, and all their combinations, but she seemed to have no personal relationship to what she was talking about. She recited Tomkins’s words in the informative tone one uses for driving directions or a recipe: “Though terror speaks to life and death, and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man.”
From the back of the room came a cough. Dorothy, assuming someone was about to present an objection to “man” as the universal subject, started preparing a speech on how we had to cut the past a little bit of slack—not to excuse it, but we couldn’t spend the whole class period adjudicating what we already knew was wrong when there were concepts to learn, and she was aware that her belief that concepts could be separated or at least salvaged from their context put her out of step with the next generation, but—“Sorry,” said Ryder, looking mortified. “It went down the wrong pipe.”
There was no bottle of water or coffee or other beverage on the desk in front of Ryder, so Dorothy was not sure what had gone down the pipe, but she didn’t think it was her business to interrogate. It was impossible to bring a moment like this with any student to a satisfactory conclusion, but with Ryder, Dorothy was always aware of an extra layer of bad feeling, a skein of accusation and judgment. Ryder had face-blindness, a fact that Dorothy had learned after the first class of the semester, when he had approached her desk while she was pretending to be organizing her papers to accuse her of failing to remember him. “I was in your Introduction to the Major last fall,” Ryder had said that day. “You probably don’t remember me, because I have face-blindness.”
In fact Dorothy had not remembered Ryder, though she didn’t see what his having face-blindness had to do with it, unless it was that being face-blind caused Ryder to recede in social situations and avoid drawing attention to himself, and so the face-blindness, which caused him to forget others, made him himself forgettable. She should have admitted it right away, but instead she had pretended to know him, and the conversation had continued until Ryder dropped enough information for Dorothy to realize that he was confusing her with another Dorothy who taught in the department—it was her Introduction to the Major course Ryder had taken. Now Dorothy trod lightly around Ryder, anxious that her lie, which she justified as tact, might be discovered. It wouldn’t be so terrible if he confronted her privately, but she dreaded being made an example of online or in front of the class, a spectacle that she feared precisely because she knew she deserved it.
* * *
—
“Sorry,” Ryder said again.
“Can I go on?” Danielle asked, glaring around the room.
“Let’s keep going,” said Dorothy.
Danielle explained, glancing up now and again from her paper to receive nods of confirmation from Dorothy, that, according to Tomkins, shame occurred when some positive or interesting experience had been interrupted. Suddenly there was a dinging noise, the noise of a phone receiving a text message, and Ryder fumbled to silence the device.
“Sorry again,” he said, and some people laughed.
Danielle repeated her last sentence: Shame is provoked by a positive experience, she said. It involves some pleasure or joy that turns into its opposite, becomes unacceptable, or is not shared. Now Danielle was no longer giving directions. Now she sounded like a television anchor delivering news of a heat wave in a foreign country in which some old people had died—sympathetic, but abstract. She was an observer, fundamentally unaffected by the tragedy, which was local in nature. Around the circle of desks Dorothy noted expressions of boredom, confusion, and the kind of rapid stuttery nodding that indicated artificial stimulation. She began to doubt that it had been a good idea, asking these undergraduates to read Silvan Tomkins. You could do so much damage, giving someone a book at the wrong time. You could prevent them from loving it, or—and this could be worse—make them love it too much, or too stupidly. They might waste years of their lives because they read the wrong book at the right time, or the right book at the wrong time, or the wrong book at the wrong time. Teaching was an enormous responsibility. Dorothy hated it.
Danielle sat down.
“Great job!” Dorothy said.
The discussion that followed was better than Dorothy had imagined it would be. Ryder didn’t cough again and Dorothy almost allowed herself to believe that no one was checking their email while she talked. Toward the end, someone raised the meaning of “shameless,” and whether certain “shameless” behaviors or disclosures indicated that a person took pleasure in their actions/approved of themselves or were merely compulsive. To what extent was shame a social good, etc. “Why do people reveal their worst selves?” Dorothy asked the class. “Do they want to die, or to survive death?”
They looked blankly at her. The clock dismissed them.
“I mean, is ‘shameless’ the opposite of ‘shameful’?” Dorothy shouted to their retreating heads.
In the bathroom after class, she reviewed the points she had failed to make, the things she should have said, if only she had thought them in time. Her panty liner was smudged with what looked like a brownish fingerprint. She unstuck the liner and smelled its iron smell. Then she rolled up the liner, threw it away in the empty silver canister, peeled the backing off a new one, and smoothed it down so it adhered to her cotton underwear. She peeked in the silver canister and saw that the used panty liner had unfurled a little. She felt a pang of regret for the next user of the canister. She opened the camera on her phone to look at her hair and waited for the bathroom to empty before she unlocked the door and arrived five minutes late to the Apocalypse. No one seemed to mind. The students were thrilled by Edwards’s meteorological descriptions of the rising waters of wrath, and the hotness of the flames. Jessie—she was there, oddly; the action must have been canceled or postponed—called it “surprisingly relevant.” Dorothy tried to tell them that hell had always been hot, but they weren’t listening, and then teaching was over for another day.
* * *
—
On the train home, a man dressed in rags entered the subway car to scream the sad story of his life. His neck was mole covered and splotchy. His tatters had once been a navy-colored suit—long rents in the pants exposed hairy, frail legs—and his scraggle of beard was discolored as city snow. He clutched his fate around himself like a stole.
Dorothy was reading “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to prepare for tomorrow’s Intro course, but even had she not been reading a poem about the sea, she would still have seen the ragman as a tragic shipwreck, a dehydrated, sunburnt, three-quarters-starved captain clinging to the last splintering boards of his lifeboat. He rocked around the subway car, pointing to each passenger and enumerating his debts. To the man in the backward cap, he said: “Divorce court.” To the woman wearing an infant, he said: “Child support.” To an elderly couple examining their printed map, he said: “The staph infection I got on March 15, 2015, at Methodist hospital.” This last item Dorothy thought suspiciously specific, but even if the date was the mariner’s attempt at a reality effect, it didn’t mean he had never gotten a staph infection. And maybe it was true. Dates had an odd and uneven quality. You never could tell ahead of time what times you would remember but you were likely to remember some of them.
The woman wearing the infant nudged her husband, a handsome man who had overexercised his upper body. In village life he would have been a butcher. He peeked into his wallet and put it away. All twenties, he mouthed to his wife. She shrugged as if to say, We tried.
The mariner was already surviving his worst-case scenario. His life of extreme deprivation was a rebuke to Dorothy’s comfortable precarity, her pathology and privilege. All through the car people turned from him, because he
exposed the indefensible arbitrariness of fate, and because on some level they knew that only a few horrible turns of events separated them from him, and either they could not bear to see what they might have been, or they could not bear to face their own lack of compassion. They could not look at him but he would be looked at. They would not speak to him but he would speak.
The mariner wore appalling shoes. They had split into flaps that opened and shut like the mouths of crocodiles, or sock puppets. He shuffled to the end of the car and turned back, as if he had arrived on a podium, to address them as a group. (They had not been a group, but addressed as such became one; such, Dorothy reflected, is the power of a speaker.) He had written a movie, he announced, but his friend stole the idea and made a million dollars. He had written a novel. He had talked to some Israelis the day before 9/11 and that’s how he knew to stay uptown that day. Before his entrance, Coleridge’s words had seemed singsongy and faraway, like a hymn whose lines you repeat unthinkingly. Now Dorothy felt its horror, its abjection. She saw the true meaning of the wedding guest’s situation: what the poet means by he cannot choose but hear. It was not just her ordinary obtuseness, and her distance from the quotidian concerns of the nineteenth century, that had alienated her through so many readings from the poem. It was not just the limitations of mind and history that had prevented her from truly loving the poem. It wasn’t because she wasn’t a sailor. It was because no one wants to listen to the Ancient Mariner. Resistance, she saw with growing excitement, had not prevented her from some authentic aesthetic experience; resistance was the aesthetic experience. Dorothy was not a failed reader of this poem, she was a member of the poem’s community; she was the ideal reader! She watched as the woman with the baby followed her frugal mate to the other end of the car, alternating hands on the poles overhead like she was swinging herself along a monkey bar. Up and down the aisle headphones materialized out of pockets and bags, plugging up ears that had previously been exposed. The fear of Coleridge’s guest, the longing to get away, passed down like the squeeze of a hand.
She forced herself to look into his wild milky eyes as she handed the mariner a dollar. Then, at the next stop, she stuck her thumb in the book, stepped off the train, and darted into the next car. She turned around and the mariner was before her. He had gone through the connecting doors inside the train, which Dorothy never did, because she was afraid to die.
She pressed against the closed doors, trying to be smaller than she was. The mariner leaned close to her and asked her shoulder for a dollar. He waited calmly while she fished one out of her wallet. A thought ribboned its way through her busy mind—This man is an albatross around my neck—but, she knew, the words didn’t mean anything, they had merely become unloosed from the poem. The bellowing capitals stretched out from beneath her fingers: I shot the ALBATROSS. And then, without any warning, Dorothy thought of Richard, who she had not thought of for many years, because Richard had always reminded her of an albatross: wounded, waddling, determined, and white, with yellow hair, like an albatross’s hard, curved beak.
* * *
—
Richard was a student in Dorothy’s sixth grade class. In addition to being albino he was legally blind and obese. Dorothy, who in those days wore a cross around her neck, had tried to be kind to Richard in small ways. For example, she never held her nose when he brushed past on his way to the pencil sharpener. But he was viciously teased by the others. One day when Richard was absent the teachers herded all the students into the gym, handed out cardboard glasses that simulated Richard’s poor vision, pointed to an obstacle course, and said, “Now run that.” There were foam stairs, a mat maze, and a rope to swing from. The last challenge involved the gym teacher throwing soft balls and demanding the students catch. By the end of the period a few girls were crying and someone had a bloodied nose. Dorothy did pretty well, injury-wise, but that was because she took it slow and visualized Richard the whole time. She tried to move like he did, with a heaving, heavy grace.
The teasing got worse after that. Dorothy was a bird kid, and a few times she stuffed anonymous notes of encouragement decorated with drawings of seabirds into Richard’s locker, but one of the teachers caught her, and told her to stop. Eventually Richard stopped attending her school. Dorothy wasn’t sure if he transferred to a specialized school or if his family moved away, perhaps for unrelated reasons—a job transfer, or a grandparent died and they inherited a bigger house. She hoped it was an inheritance.
For a long time she worried about Richard’s future. What sort of career was he suited for? He looked uncomfortable behind a desk, but he probably wasn’t allowed to operate heavy machinery. Would he be able to live independently as an adult, or would his mother have to take care of him? Dorothy pictured Richard at retirement age, living in his childhood bedroom, eating his mother’s food. Were the walls painted with footballs or trains? Would he never fly away? She was twelve, but a mature twelve. She wondered about Richard’s mother. In Dorothy’s mind Richard’s mother was unhappy but kept her unhappiness a secret to protect Richard, who she loved more than life itself. Dorothy had always been frightened by the maternal capacity to love fiercely, to be caught in the grip of love. She became obsessed with the image of Richard as her son, and it frightened her. She spoke to no one about these things but God knew. God knew that she did not want to have a child like Richard. God knew she did not want a Richard, and because He knew this, He was sure to give her one, to teach her a lesson about love. Her soul, she miserably acknowledged, as she lay in the dark of her adolescent room, staring up at a ceiling beplasticked with sickly green stars, would be enriched, and she would have the blessing of a compassionate life. The love would come to her. But she did not want it. She did not want to learn a lesson, even if it meant having a blessed, enriched soul.
* * *
—
Dorothy did not believe, in an active way, that God intended to intervene in the genetic makeup of her offspring.
Only people with no religious feeling used words like “believe.”
Dorothy didn’t have to “believe” that God was going to do this, any more than she “believed” that the earth was round or that water was wet. The facts of her life, as all life, were subject to rules. She didn’t make the rules.
People who grew up secular liked to say that they couldn’t believe in an unjust God. But Dorothy saw evidence of injustice all around.
* * *
—
Dorothy was aware, reflecting on the situation, that she had not been truly empathetic toward Richard, that she had not been a friend. She was aware that she had been obsessed with Richard’s difference. She had not considered him in his full personhood. She had not actually spoken to him. She had not signed her letters. She had pitied Richard, and been afraid of him. He, who was not even monstrous, who was just a large, friendless kid with some learning and hygiene issues, had stood in her immature mind for all the monstrosity that a body could produce, for all the aberrations from the norm, for how children are so totally out of their mothers’ control, for how the future cannot be contained by the past. She wondered what dreams her own mother had for her that had gone unfulfilled. Who her mother would have chosen her to be, had she been given the choice.
The mariner toddled to the middle of the car on his appalling, open-jawed shoes and started his tale of woe from the top. He had written a movie. He had written a novel. Jesus, even this insane panhandler had finished his book! Dorothy looked down at the poem. She didn’t like Coleridge. He was supernatural, pompous. God save thee, ancient Mariner! she read, From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?—With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
She did not want to be the mariner, forcing the story of her shame on unwilling ears, yet she could not deny that only by telling his tale was the mariner released from his shame. But to be the mariner—to hold the a
ttention of others—involved some combination of tragedy and gruesome charisma, some sheer skill, that she lacked. She had a terrible vision of the mariner’s lofted crossbow and Richard’s large, soft body, cocooned in the leather jacket he always wore in a doomed attempt to appear tough, tumbling to the ground and bouncing gently on impact. She got off the train at the next stop and waited on the platform, trying, and failing, to shake this disturbing image from her mind.
Five Days Later
On the twelfth day of bleeding she went back to the ob-gyn. The receptionist greeted her with the same bland disinterest she had exhibited when Dorothy was carrying the blight. But what had seemed on earlier appointments like unwelcoming sternness Dorothy saw now as studied neutrality. The receptionist did not register any knowledge of her situation. This was not ignorance, but tact, and something more—a survival skill. To take interest in one patient’s blight would be to take interest in the plight of all. There would be no end of it.
Rog was at work. Dorothy took a seat by the watercooler and put her bag on the chair next to her and opened her copy of Rebecca. It was comfort rereading, but as Dorothy had no memory for events, it offered also the additional pleasure of suspense. Her problems with recall were a liability in the classroom, insofar as it took valuable time to be always rereading the books she assigned, but on the plus side, it made it easier to relate to the fresh excitement of her students. It was the closest she got to living in the moment—reliving moments she had lived before.
The Life of the Mind Page 6