Flyover States, page 4
Doris ranted and picked at her nail polish. “He kept going on and on about the Declaration of Independence. Fabulous, of course. But then he had to talk about Jefferson’s vision for all humanity. And so he got mad at me because he didn’t know history. I said, ‘The sixth thing that Jefferson stood for was thinking that slavery was apparently necessary, especially if your name was Sally Hemings. The guy never freed any of his own slaves!’ Cushion Boy got mad and had the nerve to call the Hemings story hearsay, to which I responded, ‘Not hearsay, DNA.’ Since when did speaking the truth become evil? It doesn’t make the Declaration of Independence any less fabulous! He called me a ball buster, when ten minutes before I was the prettiest thing in stilettos. It was a good riddance, anyway. Am I right?” She raised an eyebrow at me.
Doris knew what she was talking about. I thought about the first time I read Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. A few lines were etched in my brain because they were so stunning. Being an inferior race it would be futile and harmful to attempt to make them equal… In imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous… I think one can scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid. Blacks are inferior to whites in the endowment of both body and mind. If that was his “vision” for humanity, he had some major blind spots. I smiled and pulled up a chair next to Iris. I’ve since had Iris in my British lit course, and now she’s in my Shakespeare course. She’s a pain in the ass, that one. Knows everything, she thinks, and should share it all, she thinks.
Iris clasped her hands together in what I’m sure was supposed to be an intelligent way. “That’s quite an interesting cultural phenomenon, the sort of primacy placed on masculine expectations of femininity.” Doris looked at her. “I mean, particularly in this day and age, with post-feminism and cultural studies doing a kind of reexamination of gender and sexuality.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what language she was speaking. Doris chugged her wine, turned the glass upside down and tapped the last drop against her lips. She looked at me. “God, why don’t they serve hard liquor at these things? And it’s Sunday. We can’t even go get some Stoli.”
I frowned. “Why can’t we get Stoli if we want it?”
“You don’t know? No liquor on Sunday. Or on voting days.”
“What? For real?”
“Oh, yes. But for real,” Doris said. She patted me on the shoulder and turned down the corners of her mouth sympathetically. “Welcome to hell. And your name is?”
“Ronnie,” I said.
“Kick-ass skirt.”
“Yes,” Iris chimed in. “I was admiring it when I saw you earlier. It reminds me of one of my trips to Africa. Senegal,” she said. She looked at me knowingly, and Doris crossed her eyes to try to make me laugh.
“Well, I ain’t never been to no Africa,” I said. I could tell that Iris couldn’t tell that I was just putting some flavor into my conversation, having some fun with words like I always do. Oh, that affirmative action and the lowered standards. “But Italy’s nice. Lot’s of hot men in Italy. They love me, and I love them.”
“Good,” Doris said. “You understand that it’s normal and healthy and fun for women to actually lust.”
Iris peered into her glass and pursed her lips. “Sure,” she said. “But let’s not forget the exoticizing and othering that inevitably happens when a woman of color travels to Europe. They’re probably attracted to your difference, more than they’re attracted to who you are.”
Doris narrowed her eyes and raised her eyebrows at the same time, like she’d just tasted something tart, or like she was waiting for my fist to fly toward Iris. What burned me is that Iris was telling me something she thought I didn’t know, like she was the official spokesperson for black people. I didn’t even have to read about it in no book, either. It took me a while to figure out that the problem with race in the academy is that there are black people in books, and actual black folks with whom most of these people have had exactly one actual conversation in their lives.
“Let’s not forget? Maybe you can forget,” I said. “And anyway, it’s not my brain I was looking to reveal.”
Doris laughed. “That’s funny. Wine,” she said. “Must. Get. More. Wine. Yeah?” She motioned toward the table full of half-empty wine bottles across the room. We stood up and weaved through people to get to the table. She took my cup and poured me some. “Okay, I just have to say this, like, officially—all the white people here are not totally insane.”
“But she is.”
“Okay, yes, and also, confession: if not all of them are insane, then most. I do have to clarify. Plus, I’m not even talking about myself. I may be slowly driven insane. I’m just saying, not all.” She poured herself some more wine and clinked my cup with hers. “And I’m only telling you this because I’m on my way to drunk, and you’re, like, the only normal person, I can tell, that I’ve talked to in like, three years, and you can’t leave. So, cheers.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Wow. Man.”
“Exactly,” Doris said.
Since then, some people in the department have turned out to be nice, interesting, pretty normal people. Most have landed on the opposite side. I’m not sure that J.J.’s clinically insane, I think she’s just “paternalistic,” if I may speak the lingua franca around the department. In any other lingua franca, I could just say that bitch is crazy, and folks would know what I was talking about. After a year of living in Langsdale and teaching exactly two black students, I salivated at the thought of the TROOPS program. A room full of students with backgrounds like mine, who would probably be uneasy about going to such a big university. It sounded like a dream job to me. I told J.J. that. I also sorta kinda said that it would be nice if the students had a black instructor who knew what it felt like to be intimidated by a roomful of white people. It fucks with your head sometimes. You end up not doing the work you should be doing because you want to be invisible. Well, now, I know that was not the answer J.J. was looking for during our little interview. “You don’t think a white instructor would be effective?” she asked me.
“Sure,” I said, thinking I’d been educated by only white teachers my whole life. I’d turned out fine. But it would have been nice to have had one or two black teachers. The bottom line is that it’s cool that kids, no matter what color, who hadn’t had everything handed to them, were brought together to be educated. “A good teacher, period, is effective. But I do think I understand certain things that other teachers might not.”
“I see,” J.J. said, twisting her long ponytail.
Like a fool I waited for a phone call that never came. Now I know. You can’t get too uppity around here. Your ass’ll end up in a factory over the summertime instead of teaching.
And now, I can’t believe how my legs hurt. Tomorrow, I’ll have to wear two pair of socks and looser shoes, but tonight I just have to make it through. Two hours into my shift, Ray comes to relieve me so I can take my first ten-minute break.
“How you holding up, uh, uh…”
“Ronnie?” I sound like I’m asking my own name.
“Sure is, right. Ronnie,” he says. “Sorry, sweetheart. We get so many people coming through here, what with the temps and all.”
“No problem,” I say. I stand there for a moment, because I realize I never asked where I’m supposed to take my break.
“What?” Ray asks. He pushes me to the side and starts stacking the speakers that are pilling up. “What?”
Everything I say and do in this factory makes me feel stupid, but how should I know where the break room is if nobody’s told me? “Where do I take my break?”
“Oh. Follow that white stripe down there on the floor? Follow it around the corner, then go up the stairs when you get to ’em. But better hurry up, because you already used up two of your ten minutes.”
I grab my backpack and follow the line like Ray tells me, and when I finally get up the stairs and see a chair, I’m so happy to see that chair, I barely know how to act. I don’t even care that it’s the most depressing room I could have possibly imagined, with all kinds of bullshit plaques up on the walls about producing the most this or the most that in this year or the other. I’m still so happy to see the weird plastic orange chairs. But when I sit down, my legs feel like they’re still moving. They’re vibrating. Where’s that goddamn tennis racket now? There’s another woman in the room, with long black hair and green eyes. Tiny, like a little girl, but wise-looking, like a woman. She’s pulling her pink T-shirt away from her chest and then blowing down into the opening. She watches me jiggle and massage my leg for a minute.
“It’s gone get better, but they gone hurt till you get used to standing.”
“Hmm, I don’t know if I can get used to standing.”
She stood and crumpled her coffee cup before she chucked it into the trash can. “If you need a job, you gone to have to get used to it.” She stretches. “Have a good one…” she says before pausing. I think she’s waiting for help with my name.
“Ronnie,” I say, but she’s just yawning after stretching, and then she’s out the door.
Somebody calls out “Howdy-do, Mona,” before the door slams shut, so at least I know her name.
I get a Mountain Dew from the machine and take out one of the books I’ve brought with me. The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek. I have to read it for my Shakespeare class. I open it up to the first chapter called, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” and start to read:
According to Lacan, it was none other than Karl Marx who invented the notion of the symptom. Is this Lacanian thesis just a sally of wit, a vague analogy, or does it possess a pertinent theoretical foundation? If Marx really articulated the notion of the symptom as it is also at work in the Freudian field, then we must ask ourselves the Kantian question concerning the epistemological “conditions of possibility” of such an encounter: how was it possible for Marx, in his analysis of the world of commodities, to produce a notion which applies also to the analysis of dreams, hysterical phenomena, and so on?
Uh-huh. I squint at the page and then squeeze both eyes shut. I imagine I can hear my brain making a loud screeching sound, like a fast-moving train coming to a rail-grinding halt. I open my eyes. No, I’m in a loud-ass car factory in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of America, in a workers’ lounge that is lit like a fluorescent hell. Was this what I moved from L.A. for? Left my family for? Dumped a good man for? Hell no. As Otis Redding says, a change is gonna come. I think about all those brochures out in the world, me, with a tennis racket in my hand, and I literally crack open the Žižek. I break the book’s spine, I’m so pissed.
I take out a highlighter and underline what I think are interesting parts. I get to thinking about the epistemological conditions of possibility until I realize I have two minutes left before I have to go back downstairs, and I’m just goddamn too tired to give a shit about Žižek and that motherfucker Freud.
Doris
Teaching, Week One: Establish Dominance.
Being a teacher is a bit like being a parent—you may very well want to be liked by those in your charge, but you are absolutely doomed if you (A) let them know it or (B) make it your first priority. The first semester that I taught I was twenty-five years old and fresh out of a fascist, corporate, button-down-blouse-and-bad-shoe desk job. I wanted everyone in my class to feel as good as I did. I did the fruit-loopy teacher routine day one of “Beginning Poetry” with a stack of ratty old books, and a poem with dirty words that I read out loud (“Your mom and dad, they fuck you up”), and a big stupid smile, and a pair of jeans and strappy little sandals. I was all “Call me Doris. We’re all here because we love poetry,” just vomiting peace and love. A veritable hippie myself. They took one look at me and it was as if the voices of angels were echoing from on high: Come late to class! Turn in un-spellchecked poetry! Run all over this silly, simpy dimwit with the fruity prose! Run. Her. Down.
While a classroom is not, nor should it be, a totalitarian state, neither is it a democracy. All packs need an alpha dog. Even packs of poets. Especially packs of just-away-from-home high-school grads.’ Tis better to err on the side of big, bad, bitchy-Mc-bitch-bitch and let them slowly earn their freedom.
“Hate me now, thank me later,” is what Ronnie always says. Of course, her students love her.
’Tis also better to err on the side of not getting ever so slightly trashed the evening before teaching, but Ronnie had such a bad night at the factory that Paolo and I had to meet her and have just a wee tiny bit of alcohol. Then a wee tiny bit more. Once in the bluest of moons I think, gee, maybe this is how alcoholism starts, but I’ve given myself this parachute clause that I only have to worry about that if I’m still a lush when I have my actual Ph.D. in hand. By then I’ll probably be letting myself off the hook for getting drunk because I’m bored and alone.
I felt bad for Ronnie last night. Bad-bad. She’s not the type to let things get her down, but I’m ninety percent sure that she was seriously considering killing herself or J.J. after three nights of factory labor. It was just the three of us at the Office Saloon, plus a local playing a video game that allows you to put a naked woman together for points. I could tell by the rapidly materializing boob job that he was no stranger to the game.
“It was insane,” Ronnie said. “If I see that goddamn J.J. I’m gonna stand her on her bony hippie ass for seven hours straight. See how she likes it.”
“Tell me you didn’t wear those platforms,” Paolo said, downing his gin and tonic in three languid sips. “Tell me, tell me you didn’t.”
Ronnie leaned forward and raised an eyebrow. I know for a fact that Ronnie has not purchased a pair of non-platform shoes in at least a decade. She wears tennis shoes for nature walks (i.e., the track), otherwise, standard summer footwear is a flip-flop with a three-inch heel.
“I wore sneakers. Platform. Shut up,” she said before she saw Paolo’s face. “I didn’t know that was where the temp agency would send me. It’s so Dickensian. Truly. I cannot even pee without clocking out.”
“Eww,” Paolo said. “And that’s without even knowing what ‘Dickensian’ means.”
I swirled the last, watered-down bit of my drink around in the glass and debated getting another.
“Do you have to do that all summer?” I asked.
“Only the weeks I want to eat and have a roof over my head.”
“That sucks,” I said, which is all I could say, because I was and remain the one who does not scare J.J. and consequently has a decent job.
“I saw your maaaan today,” Paolo finally mustered, and God Bless America, Ronnie did perk up a bit. Only a good cut of actual meat makes Ronnie happier than a pretty man.
“Where?”
“Elevator.”
“Outfit?”
“Oh, God,” I said, remembering that I, too, had seen Ronnie’s latest diversion. “Neon-green tank top. Nice, normal pants, but I mean it was neon, Day-Glo, green-green.”
Paolo mouthed gay from across the table.
“Uh-uh,” Ronnie said. “I say not gay.”
“I say not gay, too,” I added. “I say bad dresser, but not gay.”
Paolo pointed at me, circling his finger at my face.
“And we should trust you about not gay?”
“Give the brotha a break,” Ronnie said. “I hear he’s from California. Maybe I’ll show him the town, if ya know what I mean.”
Two large drinks and the promise of a live, heterosexual black man coaxed Ronnie off the metaphorical ledge.
“I say you make him your summer project,” I said.
None of this, might I add, is any good for my working relationship with Zach. I sat there, looking at Ronnie, looking at video-porn guy, and thinking what whiners we are when we even dare to complain about the work we do. Neon-green tank-top man is a visiting scholar, working on some post-doc. Good, since that means he’s way smart, maybe even smart enough to hold his own with Ronnie. I think, sometimes, that’s why Ronnie has this thing about Italian guys—they generally don’t have the language skills to be properly intimidated. It’s just crazy that Ronnie, whom they practically promised the moon to, to get her to come here, is working temp jobs for the summer. And not even city-temp jobs where you can read a book and just pretend to work like everyone else in the office. Then I thought about Zach, and how he should have been the one standing in the factory in his ugly, eco-friendly shoes. So I had another Manhattan, which leaves me where I am today, trying not to look like the boozehound teacher these kids all probably remember from high school, while I double-check my notes for the first day of class: INTRODUCE SELF, GO OVER SYLLABUS, DO NOT SHOW WEAKNESS, DO NOT CURSE—EVEN ACCIDENTALLY.
Zach and I decided to meet an hour early to go over the day’s lesson plan. Since the program is TROOPS, Zach and I are supposed to go in as a united front, talk about how it’s a TEAM effort and whatnot. Be firm but kind. Trick them into thinking that they’re going to like writing when they’re fresh out of twelve years’ conditioning to hate, loathe, fear and dread it. Build confidence. Gaslight them into thinking that Zach and I enjoy each other’s company.
I’m running early, so I buy a veggie-wrap sandwich from the sub shop near the library and sit on one of the park benches in the Center Campus. Langsdale University is divided, illogically, into North, West, South and Center Campus. Center Campus is the showpiece spread, the foldout, drool-drool piece of property that seduces the unknowing into thinking the whole campus is this beautiful, colonial-style academic Mecca. Not featured in any brochure are the dorms on West and North Campus where most of the students live, cinder-block structures that make prison look cozy. I lived in one for exactly three months my first year here. I had a tiny sink in my room and had to bring my bathroom supplies to the shared showers down the hall. The couple above me had sex like clockwork every evening at 11:00 p.m. I used to fear that they were going to fall through the ceiling. What had been acceptable to me at twenty was institutionalized madness, having just moved from my own apartment in Brooklyn. I didn’t want to spend my morning looking for the shower curtain with no feet beneath it and hoping for the occasional moment when I could floss my teeth in private. I didn’t last the semester—yet there are graduate students who manage to live there for eight- or nine-year stretches.
