Do Not Deny Me

by Jean Thompson

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  Also by Jean Thompson

  Novels

  City Boy

  Wide Blue Yonder

  The Woman Driver

  My Wisdom

  Collections

  Throw Like a Girl

  Who Do You Love

  Little Face and Other Stories

  The Gasoline Wars

  Do Not Deny Me

  Stories

  Jean Thompson

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Jean Thompson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,

  New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster trade paperbacks edition June 2009

  “Wilderness” first appeared in One Story, no. 105 (2008). “Soldiers of Spiritos” first appeared in Northwest Review, no. 47.2 (2009).

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Nancy Singer

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thompson, Jean.

  Do not deny me : stories / Jean Thompson

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3570.H625D6 2009

  813’.54—dc22

  2008041316

  ISBN 978-1-4165-9563-2

  ISBN 978-1-4165-9846-6 (ebook)

  For my family of friends who share their lives

  and stories with me, and whose expertise makes

  it possible for me to build treehouses, sing in German,

  sew quilts, and catch the right trains—

  at least, on the printed page.

  Contents

  Soldiers of Spiritos

  Wilderness

  Mr. Rat

  Little Brown Bird

  Liberty Tax

  Smash

  Do Not Deny Me

  Escape

  The Woman at the Well

  Treehouse

  How We Brought the Good News

  Her Untold Story

  Do Not Deny Me

  Soldiers of Spiritos

  The heat in Penrose’s office had not worked properly all fall. By December his nose and ears were pink with cold, his fingers too thick and numb for typing. He wore a heavy, ugly wool sweater and fortified himself with thermoses of tea. He looked and felt ridiculous. Suffering had made him ineffectual. Outside his window the campus trees went from vivid color to rags of leaves to bare branches filled with ice. Students hurried along the sidewalks, intent on their own urgencies. The air in his lungs felt frosted. “This place will be the death of me,” he said aloud, since there was no one there to hear him.

  The cheerful young department secretary said she would call Building Maintenance again if he wished, and Penrose said yes, would you please. When nothing had come of that he called them himself, sifting through the confusing listings in the directory. Did he want Operations? Routing? Environmental Hazards? He finally found the right office and called three times and each time they asked him to spell his name. “P as in Peter, E as in Edward, N as in Nancy . . . ” Pen plus rose, he wanted to say, how hard is that? How hard is it to send out a repairman?

  Then on this morning near the end of the term, he found his office door open and a workman on a ladder with his head and upper body engulfed by a hole in the ceiling tile. Penrose, relieved but annoyed, contemplated saying something snappish about the long delay. He would have been within his rights. But there was always the fear of alienating the man and never getting his heat fixed. Besides, there was never any one person to blame for such things; that was the nature of the behemoth bureaucracy.

  The ladder took up most of the small room. Penrose stood in the doorway. “Hello, are you here to fix my heat?”

  “Gonna try,” said the man, still hidden in the ceiling. His voice was muffled. A bit of a drawl, a countrified voice.

  “It’s been a problem for months,” Penrose said, irritated by try.

  There was a series of hollow metallic bangings. Words came out in the intervals between them. “Yep . . . hydraulics in . . . these old buildings . . . can’t seem to get their systems squared away.”

  “Ah,” said Penrose, as if he knew anything about hydraulics and was agreeing wisely. As usual, it was nobody’s fault; it was the system. He reached for the stack of Modern Drama I papers on his desk. “I guess I’ll go sit in the coffee room and stay out of your way.” He wanted to tell the man to make sure he locked up when he left, but that was pointless, the maintenance people had keys to everything, they came and went as they pleased.

  Penrose retraced his steps downstairs and along the main corridor, walking as he always did, with his head canted downward and a half smile tucked into one corner of his mouth. That way if anyone greeted him he would be ready to respond, and

  if they chose to ignore him, as was often the case, he could

  pretend to be absorbed in his own ruminations. He imagined that the new generation of faculty, if they thought about him at all, wondered why he had not already died or retired or both. But he couldn’t afford to retire yet, and the health benefits being what they were, he could barely afford to die.

  The coffee room was empty, he was pleased to see. He pulled one of the plastic chairs over to a side table, draped his coat on its back, and got out the notes for his upcoming class. A piece of paper lay face up on the table.

  NEW COURSE, PLEASE ANNOUNCE!

  English 405, Indigenous Critical Theory: Oriented toward imagining far-reaching social change through knowledge production as sites of indigenous activism and political thought, the course develops analytical frames at intellectual crossroads where epistemologies that gather under the “indigenous” sign meet democratic inquiry (and its concerns with recognition) and a transhemispheric critical theory.

  There was more, but this was enough to unman him. The first time Penrose had encountered this new and hideous jargon, he’d thought it was a joke, a parody of all that was pompous and inflated, purest gobbledygook. He still felt that way, but it was a joke no one seemed to get except him. Scholarly papers, conferences, entire careers were now built on it, this language that was a fraud of a language, meant to obscure, mystify, bully. All the new, bright young hires wrote of hegemony and late-capitalist strategies of
empire and protofeminists and psychomorphology and colonialism and elitist reification. It was an evil code he was unable to crack. Although this new generation now in ascendancy seemed to be against many things, racism and sexism and other isms, Penrose had not been able to discern what, if anything, they approved of. No matter; they had the wind in their sails. If any one of them had complained about the heat in their office, a fleet of maintenance trucks would have been dispatched immediately.

  He was a dinosaur, a relic. They gave him the Intro to Literature courses to teach, the basic survey usually left to graduate assistants. He’d only held on to his drama courses because no one else wanted them. The knowledge of this beat him down day by day, curdled his disposition. He would have liked to point out to the smart, preening young scholars, so caught up in their third-world literatures and hermeneutics, whatever that was, that someday they too would be dead white men, just the thing they so disparaged. Most of them. There was of course the occasional woman, the occasional minority hire, full of nervous self-importance.

  Penrose’s wife had long since tired of hearing about all this. “Why are you so obsessed with these people? Who cares what they do? You need to get on with your own work, whatever makes you happy.” Of course she was right—there was something cowardly about how eloquent he became in complaint, it shamed him—but the truth was, his own work had ceased to interest him. Even if there had been any demand for the kind of careful, stately reviews or papers he’d once produced, or a sequel to the book on nineteenth-century stagecraft that had won him tenure so long ago, he had no heart for it. It was finished, over, rusted shut. He’d said everything he’d wished to say, then resaid it in as many ways possible. It had been discouraging to realize that great, timeless literature, even that portion of it for which he had professed his special affinity and critical passion, was not an endlessly refilling well. He understood, in spite of himself, the appeal of the new order: at least it was new.

  So these days, when he shut himself away in his study at home to do his “research,” he had a special project. It was a science fiction novel which recast a number of his departmental colleagues as grotesque and menacing aliens, androids, and intergalactic creeps. The title was Soldiers of Spiritos, the Spiritans being a cultured but vigorous and warlike race, menaced by various dark and degraded forces. The meanest and most arrogant of the critical theorists became Commander Gorza, a lizardlike creature deep in treacherous schemes, with a habit of spitting when agitated. The weak and craven Polypis, hereditary ruler of Spiritos, bore a striking resemblance to the department chair. There was also a pop-eyed robot modeled after the department’s serial sexual harasser, and Farella, a leather-clad shape-shifting demoness who called to mind the new assistant professor, brought in to head up the Lesbians in the Gothic Paradigm course. It was all great, trashy fun to write. Penrose thought he might someday publish it under a pseudonym—Penrose’s pen name!—amaze himself and everybody else by earning some actual money. Meanwhile, it gave him no end of pleasure to write lines like, “Curse the Spiritans and their doomed resistance! Soon their planet will be the latest outpost in the Devorkian Empire!”

  One of the graduate students came in and began opening and closing cupboards in an annoying way. Penrose gathered his things. It was almost time for class.

  But he wasn’t quick enough to avoid Herm Sonegaard, blocking the door, a heavy figure in a parka and galoshes. “Dick! Long time no see!” Sonegaard wore a striped ski cap with a tassel and exuded rosy winter warmth.

  With other colleagues, Penrose could exchange polite greetings in mutual indifference. Herm demanded full engagement. “How’ve you been, Herm?”

  “Never better,” said Herm, delighted at his own wit, something wry, precious, and British in his robust American mouth. Herm said it often enough that you imagined him ascending, rung by rung, into beatitude. “Just a sprint to the finish line, then Jessica and I are off to Puerto Vallarta.”

  Penrose made appropriate envious noises. Herm had the poetry franchise in the department. His poems were widely published in journals Penrose had never heard of, then regularly bundled into collections by the university press. Penrose had not yet found a space for Herm in his novel. It was hard to parody someone who already seemed to be a walking parody.

  Now Herm said, “You and Ellen should head south some year, stop in and see us. The place’ll get your blood flowing again. Sun on your skin. Sea air in your lungs. We hardly even wear shoes down there.”

  “That sounds great, Herm.” As usual, Penrose had to increase his wattage to match Herm’s enthusiasm. “Maybe some year when the kids aren’t coming back for Christmas, you know how that is.”

  “Quickie trip. Get on a plane in a snowstorm, get off and it’s eighty degrees. Daiquiris. Hibiscus. Water skiing.”

  Penrose promised to consider it. He wondered, with some distaste, what going native with Herm and his newest, youngest wife might involve. Herm angled his body toward Penrose, an attempt at confidential communication. “You get to our age, Dick, you have to keep the batteries charged. No better place than south of the border.”

  “Ah,” said Penrose, alarmed now. He nodded. “Lure of the tropics, that sort of thing.” Pictures came unwillingly to his imagination, the little drugstore selling Coca-Cola and potions made of cactus and bull urine, Herm counting out pesos . . .

  Herm dug a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase. “Diatribe’s going to take the new essay. I just found out.”

  The passing bell rang and Penrose was able to dodge the essay, which Herm seemed to want to gift him with. People attempted to squeeze around Herm, who still stood in the doorway. One of the junior faculty, a mop-haired young man in a velvet jacket, gave Herm a poisonous look. Herm, oblivious, began peeling off layers of outer garments and piling them in a collapsing heap.

  “I’m off to class,” said Penrose. “Have a great time in Mexico, if I don’t see you.”

  “Margaritas!” Herm called after him, stepping out into the corridor. “Cerveza! Y mas cervaza!”

  Penrose gave him a backward wave. You had to give Herm credit; he was untroubled by the new, supercilious regime in the department. They couldn’t lay a glove on his cast-iron ego.

  Penrose’s classroom was ominously silent as he approached. It was always better when there was some sort of chatter or social noise. It meant they were less likely to sit in a sullen, unresponsive mass while he tried to jolly them into a discussion. There were days, too many days, when he felt like a television screen tuned to a channel they didn’t want to watch.

  “Good morning,” Penrose said, bustling in and making a busy show of unpacking his notes and books. A few drear and mumbling voices responded. There were twenty-five of them and only one of him. It was never a fair fight.

  “Jason,” said Penrose, addressing a boy in a stocking cap, with his feet propped up on the desk in front of him. “I’m going to ask you to put your laptop away.”

  “Aww, Professor Penrose.” He was wearing a black sweatshirt with a picture of a cartoon man being dismembered by a cartoon explosion. “I’m a multitasker. My brain works better when I do two or three things at once.”

  Penrose held his ground until Jason sighed and shut the machine off. Penrose had only recently and reluctantly been introduced to all things computer. It was one more plague, students who wanted to send him their papers via attached files, who pestered him to put class material on an interactive website, and so on. And of course they all walked around plugged into headsets and cell phones, grooving and chattering away, while the knowledge and wisdom of the ages swept over a precipice.

  “I have your papers to return to you,” Penrose announced, to a general groaning. “Yes, well you might groan. I was not as impressed as I had hoped to be.” He distributed the papers and waited as they flipped through the pages, past his careful, handwritten comments, to the circled grade at the end. They were aggrieved, most of them, he could tell. After all, hadn’t they gone to the trouble of typi
ng and printing and handing in an actual paper, when they could have been doing something much more enjoyable? Their lot was cruel.

  “Professor Penrose?” One of the girls, a sophomore majoring in Wardrobe, made complaint. “Why do we have to put down the acts and scenes?”

  “So I can tell if you’re citing the play correctly.”

  “But you know the play already, you know exactly where stuff is.”

  “No, Alexa, I don’t know what ‘the part where Hedda Gabler goes all mental’ refers to. You need to be more precise and follow the standard format. If you have other questions about your papers, please come see me during office hours after class. Let’s get started on today’s material.”

  They sagged in their seats. Make us, their body language announced. Like we care.

  Patiently, he began to woo them. It was the last play on the syllabus, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. It still kindled something in him, this great family drama, the four damaged souls in their slowly darkening cage. He’d seen the Broadway production with Jason Robards Jr. as James Tyrone and Colleen Dewhurst as Mary, and he remembered it with near holy emotion. How could he make them feel any portion of that? How to make them love the thing he loved? So much of teaching came down to just that. He needed to strike a spark in them. He needed not to stand in front of one more bored, tolerant class and have them drain the joy out of him.

  He began with talking about families, how everybody’s family had the potential for tragedy, as well as love and comfort. How none of us in real life had the opportunity to stage or to express our fears and feelings as eloquently as a playwright did. “This play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood,” O’Neill had called it. And yet the play begins on a fine summer morning, breakfast just over, the day full of promise. When do the tears and blood start showing through?

  The class stared down at their textbooks, the only safe place in the room to look. Penrose measured out the silence. There had been times, in this class and others, when he had been tempted to let a silence extend itself, Zen-like, all the way to the bell at the end of the hour. But always he dutifully picked up the thread, inserted himself, asked the follow-up question or called on one of them. Today he was saved, as he so often had been, by his best student raising his hand. “Yes, Roger.”