She raises an eyebrow as if I’m being intentionally obtuse. “Fingers are pretty necessary. But two thumbs and only one space bar?” She shrugs. “You do the math.”
I do the math. The math tells me I’d better start thinking about deans and tenure committees, about campus police, about uprooting my family and trying to find another academic job in a recession. The math tells me to believe that Latoya’s injury is the accident she says it is, and to tell her to eat whatever’s in the fridge and that we’ll be home by nine thirty for the baby’s next feeding.
I hand Twain over to Latoya.
“You have spit-up on your shirt, Dr. P.,” she tells me.
But it’s only a little spit-up, not worth the time it takes to dig through the laundry basket for another shirt. For bank robbers and new parents, every second counts.
For the next two weeks, Beth and I talk about our two hours of chips and margaritas at the Rio Mexicana as if it were the daring adventure of a lifetime. It felt like it was.
The class before Thanksgiving, we’re discussing Britney’s second story. Her first one, workshopped early in the semester, was about a recent college grad who leaves Mississippi and struggles to find work in New York City. The main character carries around some kind of vague guilt because she left her steady boyfriend back home, and at the end of the story, she decides to leave New York, which she finds cold and unfriendly, and returns to him. Every semester I receive one or two of these stories, always written by bright young women who are far more ambivalent about breaking free of their families’ limited expectations of them than they’d ever acknowledge. These students want to convince the class, and therefore themselves, that their white-gown, hometown endings are happy and redemptive, not realizing that their stories are actually the tragic tales of unreliable narrators. Britney’s first story concluded with the words kiss the bride.
Her second story, turned in eleven weeks later, is set in a German concentration camp during World War II. When the Jews die, they become zombies that eat the flesh of the Nazi soldiers, who in turn become zombies that eat more Nazis, until there are no Nazis left — only a lot of zombies and a few very dazed Jews. In my five years at this college, it’s by far the most compelling story I’ve received. Her sentences dazzle. Her scenes bring her monstrous milieu to life. You can smell the flesh rotting. You can feel the hunger, the urgency of insatiable revenge. Rarely have I read horror that rang so true, and never in a student manuscript.
“I thought it was just awful,” says Jenna, who is generally quiet and always pleasant.
“Jenna,” I say.
“But we’re supposed to be writing realistic fiction.” She looks at me. “Isn’t that right, Dr. P.?”
Jenna is right. It says so on page two of the syllabus. Our mode is literary realism.
I’m thinking about the proper response — something about knowing when to break the rules, or maybe quoting Flannery O’Connor, how writers are free to do anything they want as long as they can get away with it — when Jeremy, who’s down to eight fingers, laughs and shakes his head. “She’s earned the right, Jenna.” He’s looking at her perfect hands.
On the last day of the semester, we hold a class reading — always a nice, celebratory way for my students to hear a sampling of one another’s revisions. I bring doughnuts and apple juice to class. I know I should be feeling drained and bewildered because of all the missing fingers, but the truth is I’m elated, because Twain slept for five consecutive hours between one and six a.m. We think he’s finally worked out his swaddle problem.
There’s time for each student to read two pages. Today we leave our desks in rows, and students go to the front of the room to read. I sit amongst the students in the third row, and listening to these introductory students read their own sentences, I find myself becoming misty-eyed. They’ve worked hard. They’re invested. Even Jenna, my realism cop. She stands at the front of the room holding the pages of her story with trembling hands, her eight fingers really gripping the page, her voice quavering... well, it isn’t great prose — she’ll never be a writer — but there are a couple of moments where surprising language and emotional intelligence meet, and everyone in the room sits up a little straighter.
When class is nearly done, I return to the front of the room and tell everyone that I’ve enjoyed teaching them this semester, and I wish them all a happy and safe winter break. They file out of the room smiling and chatting with one another about travel plans and finals exams and end-of-semester parties. A couple of the baseball-cap guys come over to shake my hand, but our hands don’t fit together well.
I’ve driven past this apartment complex on the way to the dentist. Four two-story brick buildings, small windows, Soviet aesthetic. Even the holly bushes lining the foundation look utilitarian. On the stoop outside apartment 3 sit two guys with cigarettes in their fingers and beer cans at their feet. They both wear knit, button-down shirts, blue jeans, and leather shoes I wish I owned. They tilt their heads up at me as I approach the door and step between them.
“Hey,” I say.
“Yes, sir,” one of them says.
My torn jeans and black T-shirt, chosen to make me look youthful, only flag me as out-of-shape and underdressed. I often run my choice of outfits by Beth, but when I was leaving the house tonight, Twain was asleep in his crib and Beth had seized the opportunity to shower. She was humming to herself, some melody I didn’t recognize, and I left her alone.
Now, I try to remember why I decided to come. Other than the portfolios I still have to grade, the semester is over. I don’t owe anybody anything. But after five years, this invitation is the first concrete bit of evidence that maybe I’ve had a lasting impact on my students. The first indication that despite our differences in age and geography and personal histories, we all expanded our sense of what it means to be a writer in the pursuit of truth and original expression.
Or maybe this: parenting a newborn is a lonely business, and it’s nice to be invited to a party.
I open the door, step inside, and scan the crowd. Undergrad parties haven’t changed much: too many people crammed into too small a space, a keg sitting in a barrel of ice, those oversized red plastic cups. Even the posters are the same as when I was in college — Bob Marley, Robert Plant — though the posters don’t match the music, with its electronic beats and autotuned vocals.
A few kids eye me and turn away. Then Gina, who lives here, spots me, and her eyes widen. She shouts across the room — “Dr. P.!” — and weaves through the crowd to greet me, laying her hand on my arm. “You made it!”
I smile. “Of course I did.”
“What?”
I have to lean in and talk directly into her ear. “Of course I did!” Her hair smells sweet and smoky, and I suppress a surge of jealousy toward every last person in the room.
She takes a step back and sizes me up. “Hard to believe this is... you.”
“How do you mean?”
“You look really — cool!”
“I feel like an idiot. I like your bandanna.” It’s tie-dye, and covers her hair. She has some kind of flowery hippie shirt on.
Her smile returns, and she grabs my hand. Hers is warm. “Get a beer and come on. A bunch of us are in the bedroom.”
She leads me to the keg, then pulls me through the apartment, past the kitchen, and into a short hallway. Just as I’m becoming a little nervous — young woman, bedroom — she opens the door. More than a dozen people are in the room, drinking and talking. Gina announces to the room: “See? I told you he’d make it!”