Flyover States, page 14
“Doris,” she says, like she’s just meeting me for the first time. “How are you doing, Doris?”
“Aside from trying to get six hours’ worth of work done in four, and not look like dogshit when I arrive for my sister’s wedding, just fine.”
I wouldn’t normally swear in front of J.J., except that she is wasting my very precious time.
“We’ve had a bit of a situation come up,” she starts, leaning back in her chair and pulling a manila folder from beneath a stack of the same. “One of the parents called last night.”
“What parents?” I ask.
“The mother of one of the young women in your TROOPS section. It seems she’s quite concerned about the content of what takes place in your classroom.”
“You’re kidding,” I say. A clammy sweat starts to break across my arms.
“I won’t read you the exact content of the exchange.”
“The exchange?”
“It’s just a series of phone calls for now,” she says, stroking the folder like a delicate piece of china. “The young woman is very upset, not about your class, but about her mother. She’s worried about her grade.”
“Excuse me,” I say. “But what is the problem?”
“The mother is under the impression that you’ve been using pornographic materials in the classroom, specifically, a page from JUGS magazine.”
“Penthouse,” I say. “I mean, it was Penthouse, but I didn’t bring it in. It was part of the advertising assignment, and you know how some of these kids are. This guy, Will, he brought in this porn ad, and I told him that it wasn’t appropriate. It’s not like I’m passing out girlie magazines.”
J.J. looks at me without smiling, then opens the folder, but tilts it away so that I can’t get a look at what she’s reading.
“She goes on to say,” J.J. continues, “that the language used in the classroom is also inappropriate. Quote, the teacher says things like ‘bitch-ass punk’ and ‘shit,’ which should not be said in any classroom, unquote.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say. “Is there a context for her complaint? Does she even listen to how kids talk today? Why am I getting singled out? I’m so careful about how I teach.”
“But you’re not,” J.J. says, “careful about your mouth, now, are you, Doris?”
“I am thirty years old,” I state. “I should be able to say whatever I damn well please if it helps get my point across.”
“That’s precisely the point,” J.J. says. “If this is the sort of complaint I’m receiving, then you’re not getting your point across, not in the most effective manner. I’m going to let you finish teaching the class, and I’m going to let you do your own grading, and hold off on disciplinary action, which, please know, I am on your side about, to keep you from losing your teaching contract.”
Now I really might throw up.
“Losing my teaching contract?”
“Forget I said that,” J.J. says. “It’ll never happen. Just finish the class, as usual, and we’ll straighten all of this out after grades are in. I don’t want you taking anything out on this student, because as I said, she’s made it known that she likes the class and that her mother is overreacting. You know Langsdale policy, though, we have to write down everything and take the mother’s position seriously, even if she doesn’t have the support of her daughter.”
J.J.’s mouth is still moving, the lone piece of slaw has crept down her chin, and I close my eyes, wishing to God I’d had the sense to leave town without answering that damn phone.
I now have two hours and forty-five minutes to catch my plane, and with a two-hour drive, twenty minutes for parking, and eight hours’ security to fly into New York, there’s a good chance that I’m going to miss my flight. On the way out of my meeting with J.J. I run into Zach, who looks red-eyed and groggy, but is in super-chatty mode.
“Doris,” he says, “thanks for the soup.”
“I can’t talk,” I say. “I’ve got to get myself to the airport, and I’m not even sure I packed right, and my plane leaves in two hours and forty minutes now. Ronnie’s gone, Paolo has rehearsal. I’m not going to make it. And I might get fired.”
Then, even though it’s the last thing I want to do, I start to cry.
“I’ll drive you,” Zach says. “I owe you. You’ll make it.” He pats me on the shoulder. “Stop crying. They’ll pick you up at the airport and think you’re some red-faced alcoholic.”
“Oh, Zach,” I say. “They already think that.”
On the way to the airport, I fill Zach in on my conversation with J.J. He’s stone-faced, properly scandalized both at the mother in question and at J.J.’s evasive nonsense.
“I loathe her,” I say. “If they don’t fire me, I’m quitting.”
“But it’s not the student, right? The student stuck up for you.”
“I hate everyone,” I say.
Zach laughs. There’s a toy hula dancer glued to his dashboard, and she’s gyrating spastically. He’s doing eighty and unless he gets pulled over for speeding, I’m going to make my plane.
“You’re a good teacher, Doris. It’s all going to work out, so you can’t let it ruin your weekend. Your sister is getting married.”
“To a fascist.”
“To your fascist-in-law, and you’re going to have a blast. Maybe they’ll have some pink wine and you can make those city boys remember what they’re missing.”
“I hate boys,” I say. “They’re lunatics.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Zach says, clenching the steering wheel tight and pulling himself slightly forward, “Mandy called it quits.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’ll find someone else, I’m sure of it.”
“It’s impossible to date in a college town,” Zach says. “Unless you think Sharelle or Linda is open to earning a little extra credit.”
He gives me a wicked look.
“You’re preaching to the choir.”
“I smoked half a bag and watched twenty-two hours of television straight. Animal Planet marathon. Did you know that there’s an animal called a humanzee? It looks like an ape, but it can walk upright and it likes to smoke cigars.”
“Is it single?” I ask.
We’re finally at the airport, and Zach drops me off curbside with thirty-six minutes to catch my plane.
“You saved my life.”
“Just forget about this place,” Zach says. “Forget about J.J. and everything because it’s all going to blow over and in two weeks you’re not going to care. But if you pout through your sister’s wedding, you’ll hate yourself later.”
“Okay.”
“Just don’t forget about it so much that you don’t come back.”
He’s not smiling, but his eyes are squinting slightly and a flush rises from my chest, to neck, to face. I exit the car as quickly as possible, hoping he won’t notice, and lug my duffel bag to the curbside check-in, make small talk with the attendant while I watch the reflection of his silver-blue sedan linger, linger, linger, and then pull away.
Ronnie
I’m waiting curbside for my friend, Bita, to pick me up. I watch cars that aren’t hers pass me by while I fight the urge to sit down on top of my bag. It was a rough flight. Turbulence that had me always looking to see if the flight attendants had any form of body language that might read, “Jesus will be meeting you at the gate. The pearly one.” I didn’t used to be a bad flyer. I’ve flown to Europe three times with my old boyfriend, Sammy, been flying back and forth from L.A. to Langsdale for two years now. But the world is full of weirdos with crazy ideas about who’s better than who, and who to blow up or invade because of such ideas. Being in a plane makes the mind play tricks on you—especially if you’re flying in crazy weather. I’ve never seen a tornado up close and personal, but Indiana’s been hit with a lot of them this summer, lots of Wizard of Oz nasty weather. As I rode on the airport shuttle, because needless to say, I fucked up my ride with La Varian, the weather reminded me of the tornadoes that hit last summer, right after Doris dropped me off at the airport. Last summer, leaving Langsdale, the sky looked a little too green for me. Even though it was warm, we got hit with a storm that rained hail so hard on Doris’s car that she’d checked for scratches when we finally got to the airport.
To get a better look at her car, Doris had pushed her sunglasses on top of her head because, of course, ten minutes later there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sun was blinding, and it was steaming. “Does everything about the Midwest have to be a total disaster? A train wreck? Armageddon? No, I take that back. It’s classic Freudian overcompensation—this is why they have to have biblical weather, when it is so not necessary. It’s summer! How does hail figure into summer?”
I stood with my duffel bag on my shoulder and watched her rub her thumb over a speck on the hood of her car.
I was just glad it wasn’t snowing, which is black-people kryptonite, if you ask me. Africans are genius, and ain’t no black folks in Utah for a reason. “So unnecessary,” I’d agreed. “Like trees and nature and birds and shit. What’s the purpose of squirrels, anyway? Or chipmunks? I mean, what do they do? What’s their point?”
Doris gave me a big hug after she was satisfied that her car was no worse for wear. “You’re totally deranged,” she’d said. “Don’t forget to check the MAC counter for that new pink gloss. Saw it, want it, and won’t ever get it in Langsdale.”
“Done,” I said. “Anything else you need?”
“Help,” she had said, walking to the driver’s side of her car. “Help.”
I’m wishing I’m up in the bar, Encounter, across the way, having a drink, and just when I am about to make a chair out of my bag, Bita pulls up next to me in a car I don’t recognize. It’s a big car, one of those huge Jeep-truck-van-combo–type things. She waves at me with a big grin on her face.
“What’s this?” I give her a clumsy half hug from my seat. “When did you get this thing?” I take a deep breath. I like the new-car smell. Bita shakes her head but keeps her eyes on the road. “You look so good!” I say before she can answer me. I touch a section of her long brown hair and then tug on it a little bit. She smiles and absently scratches her light brown cheek.
“Thanks,” she says. “Charlie. He insisted on this thing because he thought it was safer, better for me to be bigger, or as big, as everyone else on the road. Besides, Charlie’s making so much money now, he’s practically nervous if he can’t spend it.”
“That sounds like Charlie,” I say. Bita’s been married to Charlie for five years now. I’ve decided I like him, though I never would have pictured her with him: a slick, midlevel TV writer. Used to be midlevel, I should say, because now he’s really raking it in. He’s always working. He’s a good Midwestern boy from Chicago’s South Side. Charlie Flannigan. I still get a kick out of thinking of her as Bita Flannigan, because her last name used to be Gupta. “Nice Indian name,” her mother said at the wedding. She’d adjusted the draping of her sari and then shook her clasped hands at me. “Flannigan,” she said again, a little bit sad. She looked at me as if I had something to do with it. I stare out the window and think about my mom and dad.
“Hey,” Bita says. She knows me well. “Your dad’s going to be fine.”
“Sure.”
“I’m glad you’re staying with us tonight.” Bita’s trying to sound cheery. “Charlie’ll be home late, as usual, so we can sit up and get shit-faced, and you can tell me about this La Varian.”
La Varian. I’d tried to push him out of my head because it hurt whenever I thought about him.
“Idiot!” Bita says. “Motherfucker.” She shifts in her seat and leans into the steering wheel the way kids do when they’re racing each other. She keeps checking her side and rearview mirrors for the best time to accelerate. Another driver, in what looks like an even bigger car, isn’t letting her merge onto the 405.
Sure I complain about people who are insanely rich with no understanding of what money means to folks who don’t have it, but I also know that staying in Bita and Charlie’s house last night felt good. Better than the fanciest hotel I could ever imagine. Bita made steak, which I ate like it was going out of style, and while we sat on the deck drinking forty-dollar bottles of wine, I took in the twinkly lights of L.A. from their outrageous view, and she and Charlie laughed at my stories about Langsdale and La Varian. I almost missed Langsdale when I talked about it, but the La Varian humor was a mask, a performance.
It was hard to get up and go this morning because I would have really liked to hang out on Bita’s sunny deck for the rest of the day. The air was good and the sky was clear. Charlie was already up and gone, but Bita’d stay home, maybe garden, maybe go shopping, read, rent a movie if she felt like it. What must that feel like, to have no obligations to anyone or anything? I’ve borrowed her “old” car—a Mercedes—to get from L.A. to my brother’s house out in Riverside. It would take one hour and twenty minutes if there was no traffic, so I had a lot of time to think about my ending up the clichéd floozy of a married man. I find a hip-hop station—nonexistent in Langsdale—and drive.
After I’d read La Varian’s chapter and stared at “my” and “wife” for a very long time, I decided to wait until he got up and simply ask him about it. My confusion was such that being “angry,” i.e. “going off,” wasn’t even part of my reaction—yet. I waited until he woke up and came looking for me in the living room. He grinned at me, happy that I was finally reading his work and would give him feedback.
“What part are you on? Did you finish?” he asked. He leaned into me so he could get a better look at the screen flipped open on my lap. “I think the Cunard section can be tighter, but I’ve looked at it so much, I don’t know anymore. What do you think?”
While he was sleeping I’d thought up a whole lot of dramatic-soap-opera, Erica Kane shit to say to him, but for once, wasn’t so interested in words. “I read in your footnotes that you thank your wife. What’s that? You’re married?”
La Varian’s face changed like one of the homemade cartoon books we used to make when we were kids, the kind where you sketch different expressions on a happy face and flip the pages fast so it looks like the face you’ve drawn is changing. Happy, confused, sad. Happy, confused, sad. “Oh.” Silence. “I forgot that footnote was in there.” He stood there stroking his goatee.
“That’s your answer? You forgot the footnote was in there? What about the wife part? Did you forget you had a wife, too?”
“No, now wait a minute. Ronnie, I swear, I am not married.”
“You’re not married.”
“No.”
“Not married.”
“No.”
My eyes wandered around my apartment while my brain tried to take in what La Varian was saying. They stopped on a black Barbie that was propped up on one of my bookshelves. She was wearing a red party dress. I was too old to have that sort of shit in my place. “So what does ‘I’d especially like to thank my wife’ mean then?” My conviction wavered a bit. Could I be wrong and acting like a stupid insecure girl? There is always an explanation for these types of things, things that seem quite plain and self-explanatory, like the missing item from your home that you swear someone must have stolen, only to find it where you looked ten times before.
La Varian leaned his back against the arm of my couch and folded his arms over each other. He looked around the room, and I could see him thinking, “Okay, I should say, ‘technically’ I’m married.” He rushed on when he saw my twisted-up face. “But I’m separated, we’re separated right now.”
“So how can you sit there and tell me you’re not married? You said, ‘No, not married,’ those were your words.” I wasn’t even that concerned with the news of him being married anymore. It was the lying, the lies he was spinning, the relativism bullshit that was blowing my mind. He kept talking and talking. Since they were practically divorced, he didn’t feel the need to tell me, he didn’t anticipate meeting someone like me, and he was afraid I wouldn’t go out with him if I knew, he was still married on paper, but not in his heart…. The sad thing was that I was trying to figure out a way to make all this okay with me. Hell, the ironic thing was that if he’d just told me the truth, the whole truth, I wouldn’t have cared. It was the whole making-the-decision-for-me thing that was hard to swallow.
“If you’d just told me,” I said. “That’s not how you treat people. You are so fucked up.”
La Varian frowned at me. “I’m fucked up?”
“Um, yeah? I’d say so.”
Now La Varian’s face went from worried to pissed. “I may not have told you straight out that I was married, but look at this ring.” He shook it at my face. “You could have noticed it if you wanted to.”
I looked at the ring. I’d seen it a hundred times. It was ornate, a silver-and-gold braid with diamonds in the crevices. Very Las Vegas. “That’s a wedding band?”
“It’s on my ring finger isn’t it?”
La Varian wore so much jewelry, had so many rings, that he walked around looking like a black Liberace half the time. How was I supposed to notice that one? “Please!” I said. “Look at all the shit you wear. Besides, it’s not supposed to be some sort of investigation, clues I’m looking for to know if a motherfucker is married. Don’t turn this around.” I was finally getting to one-hundred-percent angry. He was a jerk.
I carefully placed his laptop on my table and stood up. “This is so not going to work,” I said.
La Varian busied himself by closing down his computer. “You’re right.” He snapped it shut. “We are very different people.”
I shouldn’t have cared, but I had to ask. “What does that mean?”
“It means, Sally from the Valley, that you have just let Langsdale fuck you up, running around with your little dress-’em-up friend, hanging out in hick bars, working in a goddamn factory next to a bunch of Bubbas. You’re not doing anything but slumming it. And the first thing they send me when I apply for the fellowship is that ridiculous brochure with your ass holding a tennis racket. You’re like a commodified apologist for white folks, making Bubba, Buffy and whoever else feel good about themselves.”
