There were other differences, too. Once I asked my mother what a Communist was. This was in 1957. “It’s a person who wants to help poor people,” she said, and then quickly turned her back and started washing dishes. I stared at her apron and thought about this. A week later I asked my father the same question. He scowled, sat me down at the family-room card table, and set up an exhibit using two cookies. “Here, Benna,” he said. “This cookie’s yours.” He placed it in front of me. “And this cookie’s mine.” He placed the other in front of himself. “An American says what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours, right? A Communist, though,” and my father gazed intently at me to make sure I was paying attention. I was hungry. I was thinking about the cookie. “A Communist says, ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine,’ ” and at that he snatched up both my cookie and his and shoved them in his mouth and chewed. I didn’t cry out, though I wanted to. Something was wrong. Maybe only lady Communists helped poor people. Men and women were different. I understood that. Men drove the station wagon too fast, and women said things like “Slow down, Nick. Your gonads are taking over.” Men were also more likely to complain about the cooking, and women were more likely to serve skimpy TV dinners in revenge — for three whole weeks or until the apology, whichever came first.
These were clear.
But these were little things and long ago. As I got older, I grew even more confused.
· · ·
The eight o’clock class was doing a group sestina. When in doubt, Eleanor always said, do a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen by the students themselves: arm-hair, Spam, motorcycle, plié, lounge, crash-helmet. The teacher wrote them on the board. The in-class assignment involved writing on a sheet of paper one line with the appropriate end-word and then passing it to the left. By the end of the period they would have twenty sestinas and everyone would have contributed. The members of the class were having a good time. The teacher could hear their giggles and their scribbling. It was a party game. It was ludicrous. It was the only way she knew how to teach.
The ten o’clock class was doing a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen and written on the board by the students themselves: paste, haste, drinking, typing, erasing, and mame, spelled like the Broadway musical. “What is this?” howled the teacher, pointing at the last. “To mame? Is that ‘to coax the husk right off of the corn’?” And for a moment she burst, frighteningly, into song. “You’ve got to learn how to spell,” she said finally, “or it will make me hysterical.”
The teacher took a walk before her afternoon class. Near the campus were several old houses rented by some of FVCC’s full-time students and from them blared radio jabber and stereo music. That is the difference between the young and the not-so-young, she thought. The young keep their windows open so that the world can fly in and out. By the time you hit your thirties, you’re less hospitable; you start closing up the windows. You’ve had enough of the world; you have, you think, everything you need for the wintry rest of life. You can’t let anything else in, for you will never understand it. And the nightmare, of course, is that as you slowly start shuttering up your house, you turn and suddenly see, with a gasp, that you are the only thing in it.
· · ·
The two o’clock class was doing a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen: race, white, erotics, lost, need, love, leave. The teacher wrote them on the board, stretched them out in a long horizontal list.
“We don’t get to choose our own?” asked a student named Herb.
“You’ve got seven words there,” said a black student named Darrel, who always sat in the back by the window.
The teacher had to erase one. She hesitated, looked along the list, considering, putting her hands on her hips, a gesture of nonplussed authority. Then she reached over and erased love, but changed her mind again and wrote it back in. Then she walked over and erased white.
The students began writing the first line of a sestina.
The teacher looked out the window. It was too warm for November. They were having a spell of Indian summer. Outside in the sun there were dogs. A male dog had just hopped atop a female dog, piggyback. The female dog just stood there patiently, looking alternately glassy, bored, embarrassed. The teacher turned away. She chewed on a cuticle. “Men are outrageous,” she said to herself.
There is a thread dangling from the crotch of my jeans. I grab it tightly and yank it to snap it free.
“What on earth are you doing?” says Eleanor.
“This is my penis envy,” I say, holding up the thread.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” she says.
“Who’ve you been hanging around?” I construct an exaggerated wink.
Eleanor has made a wonderful fettuccine carbonara. We sit in the dining room of the half-of-a-house she rents. We chat amiably and, amazingly enough, manage not to bring up the subject of our lovers (it’s as if our sex lives have embarrassed us somehow, dragged us through indignities) until just before dessert.
“Trouble in Newton-land,” says Eleanor. Newton is the biochemist she’s been seeing for over a year now. “He’s having an affair with someone. He says he feels rejuvenated with her.”
“Oh, Christ. What is she, another biochemist?”
“No,” sighs Eleanor, stacking up dishes for the kitchen. “She works for AT&T.”
Sympathy is important at a time like this. “God,” I finally say. “I’m so glad I have MCI.” And then I take out a pen and a scratch pad from my purse and draw her a picture of a woman with large breasts and a t-shirt that reads AT&T: YOU BROKE US UP, NOW WE BREAK YOU UP. One needs to be a girl about these things. Graduate school can knock the girl out of you, and, really, sometimes you just need to be a girl.