“They’re okay.” As we walked, I snuck a look at her.
“I know about your conversation yesterday with Dean Fletcher,” she said, “if that’s what you’re wondering. I’m curious about how you’re feeling.”
I didn’t say anything-I honestly didn’t know what to say-but when my self-consciousness about the silence overrode my confusion about how to respond, I said, “Fine.”
Then it was Ms. Prosek’s turn not to talk.
The problem was, Ms. Prosek was not just the teacher whose class I was bombing, whose flunking grade might result in my expulsion-she was also my adviser, and, until quite recently, even for the first several months after my math grade had plunged, our relationship had been nothing but chummy. I’d gotten to know Ms. Prosek freshman year because she was the thirds basketball coach. She didn’t seem personally offended when we lost a game, as some of the other coaches did, but we somehow got her to promise that if we ever won, she’d do three back handsprings right there on the court-she’d been a college gymnast-and she did; it was the day we played against Overfield. Afterward, when she was standing there a little unsteadily, with her hair askew and the other team gawking at us, Ms. Prosek said, “I definitely should have worn a different bra.” On the days when we weren’t playing the same school as JV and varsity, instead of riding the bus we rode in a van that Ms. Prosek drove, and on the way back to campus, she’d take us to McDonald’s.
There were two things I admired deeply about Ms. Prosek, and they reinforced each other. The first thing was that she seemed liberal-she was, though I did not completely understand the meaning of the word at the time, a feminist-and she was neither belligerent nor apologetic in the expression of her views. She once drove a van of students into Boston for a pro-choice rally (I didn’t go because I was a freshman and I thought maybe I wasn’t supposed to) and she wore no makeup and, on Sundays, she wore a blue bandanna that pushed back her curly hair. The second thing about Ms. Prosek that impressed me was that she had an extremely handsome husband. His name was Tom Williamson, he worked in D.C. as a speechwriter for a Democratic senator, and he wasn’t around much except on the weekends, but sometimes he’d just materialize for formal dinner in a coat and tie, or you’d see them running together, and girls would elbow one another: There goes Ms. Prosek’s cute husband. Ms. Prosek herself was attractive but not beautiful, maybe not even what most people would call pretty, and it filled me with wonder-that she was not beautiful and he loved her, that she was smart and opinionated and he loved her, that it seemed, from the way you’d see them talking or touching in a casual, not particularly romantic way (his arm around the back of her chair with his fingers just grazing her shoulder, his head tilted toward her as she said something while they made their way down the crowded steps outside the dining hall after dinner) like maybe he even loved her a lot and like she really loved him back.
“I won’t lie,” Ms. Prosek said. “I’m worried about you. Do you and Aubrey have a study plan?”
“Kind of. But I guess I don’t understand if the exam is only a week away, why did Fletcher wait until yesterday to threaten me with spring-cleaning?”
I wanted her to refute that Dean Fletcher had made any such threat. Instead, she said, “Are you telling me you would have done things differently if you’d known what the consequences were?”
“No,” I said, and I could hear how defensive I sounded.
“Lee.” Ms. Prosek set her hand on my shoulder. I stiffened, and she removed her hand. We had reached the entrance of the schoolhouse and stopped walking, as if we’d agreed ahead of time not to carry the conversation inside.
I looked at her with what I hoped were widened, receptive eyes; the stiffening had been involuntary.
“Just focus on the math. I want you to be really familiar with the exponential and the logarithmic functions. Okay? Let’s cross those other bridges when we come to them.”
Easy for you to say, I thought, and it was unpleasant to feel animosity toward Ms. Prosek. Starting in the fall and continuing into March, I’d gone over to her house on Sunday afternoons, after her husband had left for D.C. for the week. (Though once he’d still been there and he’d answered the door and said, though we’d never met, “Hi, Lee,” and I had felt excited enough to take flight.) Ms. Prosek and I would review the material, and she’d be making soup or vegetarian chili and she’d give me some. When we talked about math, I tried, out of respect, to concentrate, but often I got distracted just as I got distracted with Aubrey. I was completely attentive, however, when the subject wandered to a recent chapel talk or an article in The Ault Voice, or to speculation about other students and teachers. Ms. Prosek never expressed her own views, she often shook her head when I was critical of someone, but she was usually smiling as she did so, and I could tell she found me interesting. Maybe, after all, it wasn’t her cute husband or her politics or her sportiness that made me like her-maybe it was only that she found me interesting and that in her presence, even more than in Martha’s, I felt interesting. And then one afternoon, shortly after spring break, she seemed subdued, she kept steering us back toward math when we swerved away. When I’d arrived, she’d said she had a headache, and I thought that was why, but after perhaps half an hour-I was in the middle of explaining why I thought Mr. Corning was in love with my old dorm head Madame Broussard-Ms. Prosek said, “Lee, I want to tell you something. I had to send a letter to your parents. I could get away with not sending one last semester because you’d just gotten the C on the midterm, and things were looking up. But now I’m really concerned.”
I wanted to reassure her that I didn’t have the kind of parents who would freak out over such a letter, but I wasn’t sure that was the point. And still, then, I didn’t feel real panic about my grade. What I felt was shame that I’d been gossiping so casually, that I’d made myself so at home here at her dining room table. I’d imagined that she was charmed by me, when really I was a bad student eating up her free time, making inappropriate comments about her colleagues.
“Your grade last semester was a D,” Ms. Prosek said. “That doesn’t leave you any wiggle room. If you flunk for the semester, you flunk for the year. And you’re flunking now. You have a forty-nine.”
I had known I was doing badly, but a forty-nine was worse than I’d realized.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said. “And I’ll offer the same option to all the students, but-” She didn’t finish because she didn’t need to-you’re the one I’m doing this for. The deal was to work on a project for extra credit, and that was what I made the timeline for. And Ms. Prosek did laugh when she saw that I’d included her on it, but things weren’t the same between us. In her apartment the afternoon that she’d told me I had a forty-nine, she had not, as she usually did when I left, confirmed that we were on for the following Sunday. And I could have asked in class that week, but I didn’t-I didn’t want to burden her-and because I hadn’t asked, I didn’t go the next Sunday. In class the Monday after that, we made eye contact as I was sitting down, and she pressed her lips together as if she were going to say something, but she didn’t; anyway, other students were around. I still saw her almost daily, of course, but outside of class, it was only in passing, or in a group-when it got warm in April, she had all of her advisees over for a cookout.
Standing in front of the schoolhouse, I said, “But, I mean, I’m not a bad seed. Am I?”
“Of course you’re not a bad seed.”
“I know I’m not great at sports, or I’m not, like, an asset to Ault. But I don’t break rules. It just seems like maybe I should get the benefit of the doubt. I don’t see why this exam has to be the difference between if I stay or not.”
She sighed. “I don’t know why you have the idea you’re not an asset to the school. You have just as many supporters as anyone else. Beyond that, I hope you understand that no one is trying to be punitive. But, Lee, you’re already a year behind most of your classmates in math. The school has requirements, and in order to get a diploma a year from now, you need to fulfill them. And what guarantee do we have that the same situation won’t arise in calculus? At a certain point, I don’t think it’s fair to you to keep putting you in over your head.”