Flyover States, page 19
“You are a liar and a fraud,” Doris says. “Figure yourself out. I can’t believe we even dealt, and I’m glad I’ve moved on to actual heterosexual men. Making out with some random stockbroker at my sister’s wedding was so much better than…than whatever it was we were doing. Hand,” Doris holds her hand up in front of Luis’s face. “And breast,” she says, grabbing her right boob. “One feels the other. Got it?”
Ouch, I think, looking at Luis, who honestly doesn’t seem too fazed. Could it be something like relief on his face?
“I guess I really can’t talk to you,” Luis says with the same measure, trying to play it off, but as my mother says, I ain’t buying what you selling. He turns away and walks into the kitchen.
“Hate him,” Doris says, and that’s when she notices Zach who’d been standing behind Luis the whole time. We just didn’t see him talking to someone else. Doris looks happy to see him and gives him a big smile, but he looks at her and doesn’t smile back. He just turns back to the woman next to him.
Doris looks confused, but doesn’t try again. “What’s that all about?” she asks. She looks a little hurt.
“Ain’t no telling,” I reply. “But I’d go out on a limb right now and say it’s time to go.” I wonder about who heard what when Doris was going off on Luis, and I think it’s time to cut our drunken losses and get out. “So let’s go,” I say.
I do what Professor Lind said. I don’t avoid La Varian and Iris. I just don’t have a reason to go near them. I look at them when Doris and I are leaving, though. Iris is standing close to La Varian and La Varian keeps his arms and hands close to his body. I know in my heart that he can’t give a shit about Iris, but I know in my heart that people like La Varian don’t like to be called out on their stuff, don’t like to be wrong. Reaching for the doorknob, I hear the beginning of Rick James singing “Superfreak,” and I think, La Varian and I should be dancing to that. We used to dance to music in my apartment all the time, and we were good, naturally good, like two ribbons intertwining, that’s how well we danced together. I can just hear Iris making one of her heavily theorized points about how bad it is to make assumptions about black people and dancing. It’s so essentialist, reinscribing certain paradigms of blackness, that black people are naturally good at dancing.
Maybe. She might have a point. But all I can think is that it was nice when La Varian and I danced and it would have been nice to dance with him again. Everything, all of it, would have been nice.
Doris
Freud, to my way of thinking, was mostly a great big who’s-your-daddy psychoanalytic nightmare. And if you think he was just worried about little boys wanting to sleep with their mommies, think again. Read “Dora,” a case history about some poor teenage Viennese girl whose parents split and then her father’s lover’s husband (very General Hospital) started putting the moves on Dora like the late-nineteenth-century pervert that he was. Freud thought she was “ill” because she didn’t respond to these advances. Further, Freud decided that Dora’s “hysterical” (i.e., made-up) cough was the product of her thinking about, and I quote, “organs other than the genitals for the purpose of sexual intercourse.” If that were the case, at least half the adult population would be hacking up a lung on a regular basis. Craziness. I will, however, on rare occasions, give the man his due—his thoughts on the unconscious, for instance. The idea that none of us really walks around knowing exactly what we want or doing exactly what we feel. No matter how much we think we’re self-aware and acting accordingly, there’s something lurking beneath—that seven-tenths of the submerged iceberg, just waiting to surface.
I say this not to be pretentious, but in defense of my own recent actions. Maybe I shouldn’t have given Ronnie’s number to Earl. I know he’s not La Varian, but really, isn’t that the point? And whether Ronnie wants to admit it to herself or not, Earl isn’t just another Billy Ray. The week Ronnie was gone, Earl motioned me over while Paolo and I were at the Office Saloon. “Did I offend Ronnie?” he asked, concerned. Earl doesn’t look concerned when he cuts off drunk bikers twice his size, but he was worked up, twisting a towel in his hand while he was talking. “I would never offend her,” he vowed. He acts like a different person when Ronnie’s around, tries to impress her, begs her to ride that bike of his (a death trap, if you ask my opinion). And Ronnie can’t quite see how she acts around him. She held back on the La Varian thing with Earl, never told him all about it, which I can’t but think means something, even if she doesn’t want to admit it. I quote Dr. Freud here: “The person under analysis”(or for my purposes, trying to date successfully) “must overcome certain resistances—the same resistances as those which, earlier, made the material concerned into something repressed by rejecting it from the conscious.” Of course Ronnie doesn’t want to think about dating Earl and staying in Langsdale. Heck, I’d chuck that right from my conscious mind, as well. But if she can just separate Earl out from the Langsdale part, take the idea one little dose at a time, de-repress it, to bastardize my Freud, I think she just might have a nice six months or so. Or more? Or less? He’s not your average Billy Ray.
I run this elaborate, dare I say insightful, theory by Paolo, while we’re sitting outside at the Vineyard, waiting for Ronnie to show.
“So funny,” Paolo says. “That’s the longest explanation I’ve ever heard for the fact that you, yes you, have the biggest mouth ever. Ever.”
Not nice.
“And now,” Paolo says, “we can’t even go to the Saloon until Ronnie gives us the go-ahead. I’ll go broke drinking here.”
For the local wine bar it’s nice enough. You can sit outside the rare evenings it isn’t pouring rain. But the service is worse and the drinks cost twice as much than at the Office Saloon.
Paolo swats a mosquito that’s as big as a quarter away from his face.
“God almighty,” he says. “They’re nuclear bugs out here. I can’t get West Nile, at least not until fall, when I’m teaching the grown-ups and have health insurance again.”
He motions one of the waiters for a citronella candle and is summarily ignored.
“They’re mad,” I whisper. “We’re bad customers.”
“You’re the one who ordered water, Doris. At least I’ve had the decency to nurse this glass of wine, which, by the way, is now the temperature of swamp water. White wine. Not good.”
“Paolo, as of last night, I can officially no longer handle my liquor. You should congratulate me.”
He shakes his head.
“Story first.”
At that moment, Ronnie arrives, wearing a baby-doll sundress and her dreadlocks in two gigantic bunlike clusters on either side of her head with thin, gold hoops in her ears. Very summer chic.
“The force,” Paolo says. “May it be with you.”
“Don’t be so obvious,” Ronnie says, laughing.
Paolo has on a white, ribbed tank and clam digger–style chinos. Nothing to make fun of there; he could step on a runway and not look out of place.
“So why isn’t Doris drinking?” Paolo asks. “Did I miss the one fun, English department party of the millennium?”
“No,” Ronnie says. “Just the funniest.”
“So?”
“Long story short,” Ronnie says. “Luis. Doris. Lots of wine. Doris taking her hand, grabbing her breast, showing Luis—and the rest of the department—how it’s done. Luis walking away. Doris passing out on the way home and begging to go to Denny’s.”
“Ugh,” I say. “I forgot about that part.”
“Doris,” Paolo says. “Shame on you. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say that was gay bashing. Poor Luis.”
“Poor Luis, my ass,” I say. “I thought I was over all that nonsense, but evidently I have a lot of leftover Luisophobia. It just might have looked accidentally like homophobia. God, I hope that’s not what people think.”
“Professor Lind said she thinks you should be invited to all the parties,” Ronnie adds. “For what that’s worth.”
“Fabulous,” I say. “Abso-freaking-lutely fabulous.”
The unconscious, if you really stop to think about it, isn’t such a bad thing. I’m not sure I’d have made it through the past week without mine. My sister’s wedding was great, lovely, fun, all of the above. I mostly forgot about Langsdale, and J.J., and my impending potential for unemployment. I even got a long, sweet good-night kiss from David-the-stockbroker—grossly exaggerated at Professor Lind’s party, but for what I choose to think are obvious reasons. I came back to no resolution. Zero. No e-mail from J.J., no nice message on my machine telling me it was all going to be okay, the charges had been dropped, etc. etc. One from Zach, asking if I got in all right, asking to call, but he’s since pulled a colossal Jekyll and Hyde. It’s a biblical personality change, Saul on the road to Tarsus–type conversion. Last week he’s driving me to the airport, this week he’ll barely look in my direction. And it hurts my feelings more than I would have thought, and not just because it’s hard enough to teach knowing that there’s a mamma-Judas out there, one person removed from one of my smiley-smiley students.
The last week of class should be the best week. It should involve me patting them on the back for working so hard, and them turning in their best essays of the summer. It should culminate in some fun activity, a party, a reading of their work, a sense of closure and accomplishment. Instead, I just watch my language and wish that they’d all go away. Even Claus notices the change.
“Frosty,” he said to me yesterday, tilting his head in the direction of Zach.
“Mind your own business,” Sharelle warned. I didn’t have the energy to engage.
I knew things were bad when Will smiled sympathetically at me before turning in his final draft.
Today, though, I decide that since it’s the last day of class, I’m going to put my own feelings aside and do the last-day-of-class dance that I’ve mastered over the past five years. What is it that they tell the real alcoholics? Fake it till you make it? They’re each supposed to bring in a poem, a song or a piece of writing that speaks to them, tell the class about it and give each other a hand. I’ve selected Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca,” which says in so many words that life is a journey we barely understand. Sparse and clear. I thought about bringing one of my own poems. They even asked to hear one, but since I came back from my sister’s wedding, I can’t even look in the direction of my computer. Something unconscious happening there, too.
On the way to class, I run into J.J. She’s jogging around the campus in a purple T-shirt with gaping rings of sweat darkening the fabric around her belly and beneath her arms. I wait for her to catch her breath while she gestures at me like a crossing guard, motioning for me to be patient.
“Doris,” she pants, “just sent you an e-mail. Good news.”
As much as I hate J.J., my heart starts doing a two-step.
“The mother. She read her daughter’s latest paper, and that, plus some other documentation, made her decide to drop the charges. We can’t get rid of the paper trail, not entirely, but there’ll be no further course of action.”
“Oh, thank God,” I say. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.”
“Thank Zach, too,” she says. “He wrote you one heck of a letter.”
I hurry on to class, and J.J. chugs off in the other direction.
I’m no longer faking happy, I’m officially euphoric. The sky seems brighter, the grass greener, bluebirds on my shoulder and all that jazz. I’m off the hook, and even though I never believed I was on the hook, I feel like some wrongly accused innocent set free, free, free. That, and Zach wrote a letter. For me. On my behalf. Mr. Hyde himself. I must look totally spacey when I walk into the classroom. Zach is joking with Claus, and even gives me a half smile.
“You look so pretty, Ms. Weatherall,” Tina says. I have on black capri pants and a peasant blouse, hair pulled slightly off my face. One of my better looks.
“What happened?” Claus joins in. “You get some? I think Ms. Weatherall be getting some when she’s supposed to be grading our essays.”
Zach looks down. I can’t tell if he’s still smiling or not. He walks to the back of the classroom and takes a seat.
“Can’t I just be loving life?” I ask.
“Your life must be hella lot better than TROOPS,” Sharelle says. She has on a bright red shirt and red ribbons woven into her braids.
“I think it’s you and Zach,” Claus says. “I think it’s looooove.”
I’m racking my brain for something to say, but Zach beats me to it.
“There’s nothing going on between me and Doris. If she’s happy, or getting some, rest easy that it’s not my doing.” He’s looking at me as he says it, not angry but no mistaking the tone.
Snippy, and with Claus, and on the very last day.
Dead silence.
I pull out a stack of papers and switch to the business at hand.
“These were excellent,” I begin. “There’s not one person in this class who hasn’t improved. You should be extremely proud of yourselves, and know that each and every one of you is better prepared than most of the other freshmen who’ll be coming in this fall. I don’t want to hear about anyone not making it through the next school year. You’re too smart for that. You’ve worked too hard.”
Back to the high fives and happiness. Zach mouths “sorry” from the back of the room. I nod in acknowledgment, not forgiveness. Since when has “getting some” with me become the single most reprehensible notion on this planet?
“We’ll start with self-assessments, then we’ll move on to our open-mike poetry/music/reading-slam-type thing.” I ask them to evaluate their own performance over the course of the semester, looking back on how their writing has changed these past six weeks. It’s better than a grade for giving each individual a sense of how much he or she has improved. They write intently for a good fifteen minutes while I swing my legs back and forth like some five-year-old, and Zach reads a book, not lifting his head until the last paper is turned in and we move on to the fun.
The reading goes well. Sharelle reads a poem that she wrote herself, an hysterically funny rant about TROOPS gossip that rhymes heavily and has everyone in stitches. Claus applauds with hands over his head. Tina’s brought in an inspirational piece, something vaguely churchy and uplifting, and for his bit, Claus procures a CD player, pops in a CD and raps along. Another hearty round of applause. They clap politely for my poem, which is clearly too highbrow for the event.
“What about your poems?” Sharelle says. “I thought you were bringing your stuff, not some old Greek.”
“I forgot,” I lie. “And Sharelle, let me say that it’s almost a good thing, since you’re a tough act to follow.”
Zach goes last and reads from one of my favorite books of poems ever, Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. When I was in second grade, I had every word of it memorized. He does dramatic voices for each of the poems, and Claus is laughing in spite of himself.
“Don’t be strangers,” he says at the end of class.
Once we’ve finished all the goodbyes, Zach picks up his backpack and makes for the door.
“Zach,” I say. “I heard from J.J. Those charges were dropped.”
“Good,” he says. “I’m happy for you.”
He starts out the door again.
“J.J. says you wrote a letter for me.”
“It was no big deal. Don’t worry about it.”
“She made it sound like a big deal. I just wanted to say thanks.”
He puts his backpack down and leans against one of the desks. I think he’s going to say something but he doesn’t.
“Don’t you want to go over their self-evaluations?” I ask. “That’s the best part.”
He thinks for a minute before looking up.
“Nah,” he says. “You can just put them in my mailbox at school when you’re done with them.”
I’m at a loss. The only thing left to do is go full-out second grade on him.
“This sounds really stupid,” I hedge. “But are you mad at me? Did I do something that I missed? I thought we were getting along really well.”
Zach doesn’t dismiss me outright. He looks at the desk, looks at his shoes, looks at the ceiling, and lets out a sigh. I’m looking at his chest, at the thin tangle of hair showing through the V at the top of his shirt, at the deep brown his skin has tanned since the start of summer. Then my eyes follow a line down his arm, to his hands, which are clenching and unclenching, thick silver bands on his middle and forefingers.
“Okay, Doris,” he says. “I’ll be honest with you, if that’s what you really want.”
But I don’t want him to be really honest. I want him to cross the distance between us and run one of those hands soft against my blouse. I want to walk over to him and weave my fingers through his hair and close to his skin. I want him to know that I’ve only just now, this very instant, realized that I’ve wanted this weeks longer than I’ve let on, even to myself.
“Okay,” I say.
“I wrote this letter for you,” he begins, making extended eye contact with me for the first time this week. “And while I was writing it, I was thinking about how much I’ve started liking you this summer. Not like Claus says, I don’t know, maybe not that, but as a person. As a teacher. When you’re in the classroom, Doris, I love being around you. You’re funny and real, and not so self-conscious and stupidly obsessed with superficial crap…”
If this is the good part, I’m not sure I want to hear the rest.
“Okay,” I say.
“And then the first time I see you out, it’s at that stupid party at Professor Lind’s house, and it’s this other Doris. Three Stooges Doris, with you and Ronnie and that dancer guy.”
“He wasn’t even there!”
“That’s not the point. I guess I’d thought when I took you to the airport that we were at a different place than we obviously were. And that’s partially my fault. But as your friend, as someone who thinks there’s a better person in there than you let on—God only knows why—you really shouldn’t be announcing to a roomful of professors who you blew over the weekend. It’s not good politics. Because not everyone sees you teach, Doris, and not everyone is going to bother getting to know you. And that stupid act you put on, that’s what they’re going to believe.”
