“Had a rough morning, Benna?”
“God, I guess.”
I try to calm down. Gerard wants to quote some more. “ ‘Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, awake; to a dumb storm, arise!’ ”
“Now you know what teaching’s all about. Like Saint Francis preaching to the birds.”
“But Benna, dearie, sweet, you used to love teaching,” Gerard says in his put-on smarmy voice. It’s also his Aunt Emmadine’s voice and his impression of certain dental assistants.
I cross my eyes and tear off corners of napkin, shove them in my mouth, and chew on them to amuse Gerard, and Hank, who looks over at me from behind the counter and shakes his head. “She teaches college, this woman,” says Gerard, pointing at me.
“What is this?”
The teacher cleared her throat. “It’s ‘The Song of Songs.’ A sort of play, really, a—” She looked at her notes. “A passionate dialogue that reaches an emotional pitch so intense that if it were to continue for even one more stanza it would tumble out of itself and collapse. Its sharpest points are its most fragile.” She looked quickly around at the class, the little marble eyes, the tucked chins, the temples angled onto fists. “It dips in and out of an erotic despair, which it’s lifted finally out of by the very hope imparted by its sensuousness.” She looked out the window and winced.
The minutes were long highways. The teacher began to pace, three steps each way, back and forth in front of the blackboard, which was really a greenboard; she remembered when they all had been black, not too long ago though long enough. These kids had probably never seen a blackboard, probably wouldn’t know who Jim Morrison was, or Huey Newton, or the song “Cherish.” They probably wouldn’t remember Colleen Corby, a fashion model whose career barely made it into midis. They probably had no idea that greenboards had once been black, that Mia Farrow had once been married to Frank Sinatra, that life had not always been like this. “For Friday I want you to bring in one of your own love or despair poems. If you don’t have one already, I want you to write one.”
Amos White, his name emblazoned across his t-shirt, shot up his hand, grinning wildly. “What if we’re virgins, man, and we’ve never known no real love or no despair?”
The teacher had taught community college too long. “See me after class,” she said.
The teacher’s last class of the day was in another building on the opposite side of the Fitchville Community College campus. It was a five-minute walk. This particular day she noticed that signs had been spray-painted: DO NOT ENTER at the truck-loading drive by the administration building had become DO NOT ENTER U.S. WARS; DEAD END had been cleverly transmogrified to read GRATEFUL DEAD HEAD; one STOP sign now read STOP IN THE NAME OF LOVE; another read simply STOP, YOU BITCH.
· · ·
“ ‘Thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Mount Gilead’? Who is this asshole?” Somebody else in the back, dressed all in orange burlap, frowned.
The teacher had already passed out the photocopies and given the assignment. “It’s God,” she said. “Would someone like to read this aloud for us?” She looked around the classroom. Twenty faces with the personalities of cheeses and dial tones. “Well, then,” she continued. “I’ll read it.” And she began, dangerously: “ ‘The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth / For your love is better than wine …’ ” The teacher raised her eyes slightly to note any squirming, any gasps. They looked inert, frozen as fish sticks.
It took a long time to read, though people did seem finally to be listening, silently reading along.
“ ‘Make haste, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of spices.’ ” The bell rang on “stag.” “Okay,” she commanded, damp with perspiration. “Don’t forget: Your poems next time.” There was a clumping and galumphing, a sliding of chairs across the floor. The teacher looked down, shuffled papers. A black student named Darrel Erni paused by her side as everyone drifted past him.
“Ms. Carpenter?” he said.
The teacher looked up. The student was smiling. She had noticed him before, on Monday. He seemed older or wiser or was it merely that he was more battered and less worried about it. It was all the same, she guessed.
“I just wanted to say that I liked the poem very much. And I liked the way you read it.”
The teacher knew asskissers from way back. They lingered after the period was over, they separated themselves from the rest of the huge cryogenic experiment that was the class, they cooed, they beamed, they twinkled. They wanted you to make them your assistant. Yet something was different here. He nodded. She liked nodders. His eyes were slightly pink, slightly shiny. Had he really been moved? Or was he on drugs like the rest of the class? “Well,” she said, all helpful teacherliness. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“It’s beautiful, you know, just beautiful.” He had an old fatigue jacket on and the anthology tucked up under one arm. He hunched up his shoulders, put his hands in his pockets, and sauntered backwards toward the door. He winked and gestured with his head. “This is a neat class.”
“Glad you’re enjoying it,” she said, something almost happy rushing to her face. She liked this Darrel Erni. But then he turned and was off down the hall with a quick padding and bounce of sneakers.
George and I send out for pizza. When it arrives, we eat in front of the TV, watching the news. “So what did you talk about in class today, George?” Cheese stretches like delicate tusks from bitten wedge to mouth.
She sighs. “We did reading groups — redsies and greensies. Then we talked about going to a dairy farm to see the cows.” George picks off the bits of green pepper and anchovies. “No cat food pizza for me,” she says. The commercial is Oil of Olay and everyone in it, though old, is happy and smooth.
“You should eat the peppers, George. They have vitamin A in them. They help you get A’s.”
She ignores me, continues vegetableless through her piece.
“I get it. You’re a redsie not a greensie, is that it?”
“Redsies are the dumb ones,” she says. “I’m a green for green light. That’s what Mrs. Turners said.”
“What’s the red? Red for red light?” How unsubtle of Mrs. Turniphead. How meanly self-fulfilling, like a churlish fortune cookie.
“No. They’re red for tulips.” And she puts her two lips together and makes a joke, a big pizza kiss in the air.
Dan Rather speaks of a volcano in the Dutch Antilles. Two-thousand-degree lava flows and bubbles thick as chowder across our TV screen.
“Poor Beruba people,” mispronounces George. Then she switches the subject. “We do fire drills next week. Lauren says there’s never any fire and all you do’s get yelled at by teachers for talking in line.”
“Didn’t you have fire drills last year in kindergarten?”
“Uh-uh.”
“No fire drills?”
“Nope.” She shakes her head then stops. “Opes. That’s right, I forgot.”
An ant is checking out the oil stains on the pizza box. I pinch it between a napkin and the cardboard.
“Can we go to Beruba someday?” asks George with her mouth full. I have taken George on two vacations — once to Toronto, a city of manufactured whimsey suited only to shoppers, and once to Cape Cod to see the ocean, at which she was much astonished and at the age of three raced exuberantly up and down the beach, arms spread, shouting at the water, “Juice! Juice! Look at all the juice!”
To me the ocean, so loaded with seafood, is more like a loud and giant bouillabaisse.