Flyover States, page 8
It’s all I can do not to burst into tears, because if I cry now, I’ll look like Armando in the Winn-Dixie when I go to teach. That’s blood-in-the-water, classroomwise.
“Rough week,” I say. I have on the same outfit that I was wearing the last time he saw me, and I don’t even have the energy to care. My one wish at this exact moment is that I don’t literally smell. Chris reaches over and rubs my knee. I push his hand away, not because I want him to stop but because this small kindness might precipitate a grossly decontextualized nervous breakdown. “I have to go.”
“How about this weekend?” he asks. “I’ll take you out. It can’t be that bad.”
“Oh,” I say. “Don’t bet on that. But it’s getting better. Like lancing a boil.”
“Or castratin’ a pig,” he says, taking on the most performatively hickified voice I’ve ever heard. “Just hold tight and lop it off, pig won’t know what hit it.”
“Please tell me you do not actually know how to castrate a pig.”
“Darlin’,” he continues, not breaking voice, “I castrate ’em so sweet they thank me for the service.”
“Really?” I say, finally laughing a bit, trying to sound like a faux-farm-girl myself. “’Cause I know some other large mammals that might be in need of a good loppin’.”
“Just pigs, ma’am,” he says. “Night out. This weekend. Now go teach, you’re late.”
Okay, before I start in on teaching these past few weeks, I would like to say that I wish that I lived in a world where high school teachers were paid a million dollars every year, and bad teenage actors on shit sitcoms got minimum wage for their efforts. I wish. If that were the case, I might not go home at night, shaking my head in disbelief at what my students haven’t learned. They don’t understand to break long passages of text into paragraphs. They have no baseline recognition of the difference between “their, they’re and there.” Or, God forbid, the more intimidating “its vs. it’s.” Subjects and verbs do not agree, prepositions regularly end sentences, and the computer thesaurus is so misused as to madden the most generous of readers. Try explaining to Claus that “a hard-knock life” and a “difficult rap existence” really don’t mean the same thing to your average reader, and risk being looked at like you are God’s original dumb bitch, because his computer told him so.
And this is not unique to TROOPS. In fact, during the school year I’ve had such hooked-on-phonics moments as reading “Ruffly tend percent” or, my personal favorite, “manageeter,” which, in conference with the student, I realized was a sound-it-out attempt at “ménage à trois.” I’ll get to why my students might be using such a phrase, but for now, I’ll stick with the class at hand. Claus is tap-dancing on my very last nerve. Luckily (and I never thought I’d be saying this), he listens to Zach. And Zach, I must begrudgingly admit, is a darn good teacher. When I finally arrive at the classroom this afternoon, atypically late, Zach has arrived miraculously early and is talking to them about their final paper.
“You get to analyze advertisements,” he says. “Find out how the media, these big corporations, manipulate your desire so you want things that you don’t even need.”
He’s back in prototypical Zach-wear: a ripped T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts. Because he’s male, and the tutor, he can get away with this. I still have to dress “teacherly” in my black pencil skirt and white eyelet blouse because I am female and because I assign them their actual grades. But I’ve added my beret to the outfit. Because I like it.
Claus makes a gigantic yawning motion. His hair is shaved close to his head, and he has on a black tank top with a thick, gold chain around his neck anchoring a giant gold-and-rhinestone C.
“You’re above that, eh, Claus,” Zach says.
“Yeah,” Claus says.
“Don’t be disrespecting Zach,” Sharelle says, thumping Claus on the back of the head with her folder. Sharelle has dark, almost red-brown skin, but she wears bright blue “fashion” contact lenses. Unsettling, especially since she fished one out of her eyeball during the first class and sat there, unfazed, with one Technicolor-blue eye and one honey-brown scrutinizing the rest of the group. She’s thin, with a tangle of braids piled atop her head, and if I had to guess, I’d say from the amount of banter between her and Claus that there might be something going on outside of class. Sharelle’s first paper was a C minus, but she raised her last paper to a B, thus her enthusiasm for the final paper. She’s gained steam and is ready to roll.
“You don’t think any of this has any practical application, do you, Claus?”
Zach doesn’t say it like it’s an attack, but like Claus is just too smart for the rest of us.
“Nope,” Claus says.
“You think the media influences the way you dress?”
“Nope.”
“You think Doris woke up this morning and thought ‘Hey, I’m going to look like a French stewardess this morning,’ or do you think it’s because she’s seen that look in some magazines, on some actress or something?”
Claus turns his head and looks at me. I smile. He doesn’t smile back. “You seen what else she wears?” he asks. “I think she thinks that shit up herself.”
“Thanks, Claus,” I say, moving to the front of the room. “And you decided to get that tattoo, and pierce your ears, and wear those jeans solely because you like them.”
“Yeah,” Claus says. “I look good.”
Sharelle rolls her eyes from behind him.
“What brand are your jeans?” I ask.
“Tommy,” he announces. “Ain’t no white-boy Abercrombie shit. Tommy Hilfiger.”
Will, whose face I can barely see from beneath a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, shifts noticeably in his seat.
“Can we try swearing less,” I say. “Just for today. And why did you buy those? Would it make a difference if you were wearing Wrangler?”
Sharelle laughs, “I’d like to see you in some Wranglers, cowboy.”
“Wranglers are some punk-ass, bitch jeans,” he says.
“Okay, this is where I want you to start, all of you, in thinking about this next assignment. Why does Claus wear Tommy, and why are Wranglers ‘punk-ass, bitch’ jeans? You notice how he uses homophobic language to talk about the jeans, it makes it ‘more masculine’ to wear Tommy, and in the same way, marginalizes women and gays, since ‘punk-ass bitch’ implies homosexuality and femininity. Wranglers are for bitches and being a bitch is baaaad. But Tommy jeans, who do you think of when you think of Tommy jeans?”
“My boyfriend from high school,” Tina pipes in. Her shirt reads, “Stop Looking At My Chest.” Normally, Tina’s part of the fashion-priestess trinity, but today she has her dark hair back in a short ponytail and no makeup. She looks like a fresh-faced kid, like she probably looks in her baby pictures.
“Mine, too,” Linda says. Linda’s in full makeup, blond hair lightened and blown straight down her back.
“How many of you own Tommy jeans?” I ask.
Two-thirds of the hands go up.
“And what about Abercrombie? Any of you wear those?”
Will doesn’t speak, but raises his hand tall and defiant.
“So at least one person—Will—wears Abercrombie.”
“Figures,” Claus says, barely audible but audible.
“Excuse me,” I say.
“What?” Claus asks.
“I like Abercrombie,” Tina interrupts a bit reluctantly. “I think they make nice shirts.”
“What if I told you,” I say, “that ten years ago Abercrombie was about as hip as Wrangler, but they got some folks together, found some hip kids to advertise it, changed the image, and now their business is booming. In fact, their ads are often considered ‘controversial,’ which is another way of selling things. So I’d like for you all to think about that, why you want the things you want. Do you buy things because a celebrity endorses them, or because they seem sexy or powerful? Everyone bring in an ad of your choosing to the next class, and we’ll talk in greater detail about the final paper.”
Zach and I have taken to meeting after class in the coffee shop to go over grades and plot teaching strategies. Ratty clothes aside, I think that dating Mandy is shaping him up, as he manages to keep his hands off his feet, and he looks cleaner somehow. His hair has even grown out, and with a slight tan, he’s almost, almost, almost got that whole Harvey Keitel thing happening again. It’s a good thing there’s no pink wine at the coffee shop.
“Thanks,” I say. “Great idea to use me as an example, really give Claus something to sink his teeth into. Just pin a target over my chest next time.”
We’re quiet for a minute because the important undergrad behind the counter is grinding coffee.
“I was trying to get him involved in the ideas,” Zach says, opening a third packet of sugar. “He’s a really smart guy. In tutorial, when he can keep the mouthing off to a minimum, he’s the best reader of other students’ work in the group. He’s probably been bored his whole life. At least in school. And you did a great job setting up the assignment. I don’t think he hates you, I just think he likes to pretend that he does. And the rest of them are enjoying the class. They say so in the smaller groups.”
“I just wish he’d tone down the smart-mouth. He made a comment about Linda’s breasts the other day,” I say, nursing my latte. “In class, and that’s the last thing she needs. Claus may have been bored in school, but Linda needs a lot of help. She doesn’t need Claus pointing out that her shirt is white, and he sure hopes it rains. What she needs is to learn the function of topic sentences so she can break a D on her next paper. I almost walked across the room and clocked him.”
“So what’d you do?” Zach asks. He keeps his eyes on me while reaching into his backpack and pulling out a wad of blue yarn and two thin silvery needles.
“What,” I ask, “is that?”
“Mandy’s teaching me to knit,” he says. “I can do it while we’re talking. It’s harder than you think. You ever knit before?”
“No,” I say while he deftly loops the yarn in place. “Looks like you’re a natural.”
“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”
“What would Claus say?”
Zach smiles. I try not to let my own preconceived notions about “masculinity” get the best of me, but there’s a huge portion of me that’s thinking, Oh, God, Zach. Don’t knit in public. You’re not Rosie Grier. You look…and the word I’m thinking is girlie, which at the end of the day, makes me no different from Claus.
“I think it’s cool,” I say. “You can make me a hat when you get good.”
“Don’t lie,” Zach says. “You’re the worst liar, Doris. It’s okay, I’m comfortable with my sexuality. Knitting doesn’t make me less of a man. Real men knit their own sweaters.”
And I’m thinking that Mandy must be trying to turn him into a lesbian, but know that’s the sort of comment best kept to one’s self, even if it would be directed to Zach.
“No they don’t. I swear, I am actually trying to think it’s cool. But maybe you should do it in front of a mirror and look at yourself, and tell me if it doesn’t look just a little crazy.”
“Claus,” he says. “What’d you tell him?”
“I kept him after and told him that just because he’s intelligent enough to find other things to do in class besides listen to me, it doesn’t mean that other students don’t need all the help they can get, and he should respect that. Then I told him that if he disrupted class like that again, he’d be cordially uninvited back for all eternity.”
“Good,” Zach says. “You think it worked?”
“Who knows? I’m just glad that Linda came back. I think that I was more mortified than she was.”
“You look at their papers? I think they’re getting somewhere. Ali’s was really good, an A minus easy in any freshman comp class. And Sharelle is really sharp. She’s good at keeping Claus in his place. Keep her as your secret weapon.”
My latte is cold but I’m too tired to get up and reheat it.
“She’s supposed to be absent tomorrow. Doctor’s appointment or something.”
“Do you ever wonder,” Zach asks, “what they’ve been doing the past twelve years?”
“Probably driving some poor, underpaid, overworked soul who thought teaching would be a noble pursuit out of his or her damn mind. I can’t even imagine five classes like this in one day. The hormone levels alone might send me into perimenopause. I just wish they’d all read a few books or something between episodes of Jackass or The Real World, or whatever they watch.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I might not teach high school after all of this is over,” Zach says. “I like the kids better at this age. I think I’d just have to get a master’s in education.”
“Education?” I say. “After ten years working on your Ph.D. in English? You want to grow old and die here?”
“Thanks, Mom,” he says. “It just seems like a good thing to do. I never taught TROOPS before, and it reminds me why I liked teaching in the first place. At least they’re excited to be at college, ready to learn.”
“So you’d still finish your Ph.D.?”
“Why not?” Zach asks. “I started it. Why not finish it?”
“But it’s so much of your life. Doesn’t it feel kind of like that soap opera, the ‘like sands through the hourglass’ kind of thing. I can’t imagine starting another degree.”
Zach stops for a moment and undoes his last three rows of knitting. Rehooks the needle and begins again.
“That’s the difference between us,” Zach says. “I don’t really see what I’m doing out here as separate from another life. I like this life. If it goes on like this five more years, I’ll be grateful. Maybe by the end of my education degree I’ll want to be a fireman, or join the peace corps. You gotta roll with your life.”
And although I am never quite able to let go of the fact that this advice is being given by a man who is knitting, who is dating a lesbian, no less, he just might be right.
Two nights later, Paolo, Ronnie and I are thick in our weekly Office Saloon decompression. Earl makes us a whole pitcher of martinis, mostly to impress Ronnie, but they taste so good that I’m almost thinking of trading in the bourbon for vodka. When Earl is making martinis, I do a mental digital enhancement of his image. I try to picture him with a slightly better haircut, at a hipper-than-thou bar in the Village, with a classy, vintage BMW instead of the canonical Langsdale Harley-Davidson. His cheeks are sunburned a warm red-brown, and I can tell by the way he looks at Ronnie, that from where he’s standing, she doesn’t need any “enhancing.”
“What was I smoking,” Paolo asks, “when I signed on board to train these little hyenas. I cannot get them to shut up. Giggle, giggle, giggle at the barre. Giggle in the center. Giggle as they pas du chat across the room. It’s ballet. Ballet. Ballet is not funny.”
Paolo has just started teaching a summer camp for high-school girls who want to be ballerinas.
“It’s kind of funny,” Ronnie says. “When Doris used to do it, it was funny.”
I got to know Paolo first semester when I took his ballet class for elective credit. Paolo would make the women in my class wear dance skirts and pink tights and black leotards, just like we were little girls. Only we’re all hauling at least a hundred fifty pounds of woman-flesh on our frames, so the girliness got lost pretty easily. And he made us do a recital at the end, wherein I hobbled through some bastardized “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” which Ronnie attended, and which I shall never live down.
“They probably just think you’re cute,” I say. “And what I was doing in that class may have been called ballet, but you shouldn’t have that in mind when you hear the word ballet.”
“Of course they think I’m cute,” Paolo agrees. “They’re ballerinas. They’re genetically programmed to fall in love with only gay men until they’re twenty, sometimes thirty, but that’s the malnutrition kicking in by then. But they’re giving me a headache.”
“Don’t talk to me about headaches,” Ronnie says. “I still have the sound of machinery ringing in my skull.”
“No better?” I ask.
“It’s okay…” Ronnie concedes. “I like this one woman, Mona. She’s funny in that real practical way, like she doesn’t mean to be, but still knows she is. And I did have a legit good time on my last break with her and Ray. They were killing each other over what Mona saw the other day at the Winn-Dixie.”
“Oh, God,” I say. “Do I want to hear this?”
“Seems that Mona was running in to get some chuck for her kids when this whole scene erupted in the soda-pop aisle.”
“What did she say?” I ask.
“Only that some foreign man was chewing out this lady, calling her a whore. And the whore-lady was just staring at him, in her high heels and short skirt. Then Mona launched into a bit about how her first husband ‘lost his way’ at one of the massage parlors in town, and now it looked like there wasn’t a safe place left. Out of the back alleys and into the supermarkets.”
“So she didn’t know I was from the university or anything?” I ask.
“Doris,” Paolo says. “Hello? She thought you were an actual hooker. How is that better?”
“She thought I was an actual hooker?”
Ronnie grins. “‘The Dixie Ho,’ Ray said.”
This is officially one of the top-ten worst weeks of my life.
“Did you say that I wasn’t?” I ask Ronnie. “Did you say that in fact you know me, that I am not an actual hooker?”
“I know you?” Ronnie asks with a straight face. “Them’s respectable folks at Valtek. I ain’t telling them nothin’ about the Dixie Ho.”
“Not funny,” I say.
“Kind of,” Paolo adds. “The Dixie Ho.”
He’s cracking himself up so hard that he’s practically rocking off his bar stool.
“I hate my life,” I say.
“You’ll love this,” Paolo states. “You know that bottle blonde who cuts hair in town—the one who looks like a drag queen, but isn’t? Well, she and Luis seem to be an ‘official’ item now. Saw them the other night walking down the street, arm in arm.”
