Eye to Eye Page 13

  Today we are reading July’s People, a provocative novel by Nadine Gordimer about the dissolution of a white South African family in the wake of some fictitious revolution that reverses the terms of apartheid. The white “masters” find themselves at the mercy of their black African servant, July, and the identity of all is in flux. I came prepared with a timeline of South African history, and an explanation of the roots of apartheid, as well as its perpetuation well into the 1990s. I’ve long since given up on expecting students to know history when they arrive in a college classroom. Hell, Ronnie taught a class at Langsdale where not one student knew what the color lavender looked like. Out of eighteen students, nary a soul had heard of lavender and associated it with a pastel blue-purple. In fact, one of the students finally ventured, “It’s like the color of blood, right?” To which Ronnie responded, in one of her few losing-the-cool moments, “Do you all live under rocks?” That was the only semester that Ronnie had less-than-stellar teaching evaluations. No one likes feeling stupid. Especially stupid people.

  Out of my class of twelve, one student had heard of apartheid before reading the book. James Jackson, a deeply Republican African-American student, who objects to any swear words he finds on the page. Asa taught him in American lit, and evidently Jean Toomer’s Cane, a Harlem Renaissance classic, was too sordid for his taste. Paige Prentiss kept her mouth shut, and the rest of the class scribbled notes as I gave a general overview of colonialization in Africa, and the legacy of apartheid in South Africa today.

  “When I was in college, not quite the Stone Age, as you might imagine, all of this was still taking place. People wore T-shirts that said ‘abolish apartheid, divest now,’ and there was a famous video where a number of musicians sang a song where the refrain was, ‘I ain’t gonna play Sun City.’”

  James nods. Paige looks at her nails. Jack Moynihan seems oddly engaged.

  “What do you mean by divest?” he asks.

  “Good question. It means that countries like the United States, which tacitly supported the white South-African government by investing in the country, were encouraged to pull out their financial assets, thus weakening the country’s economy, and also sending out a moral message.”

  And maybe this is where I should have stopped. Looking back, perhaps this was the moment to leave it at a history lesson, but pre-Marc-Jacobs-obsessed-ex-college-commie in me just couldn’t help herself. I wanted to make some link between the past and present, or as I was to learn later, “to bring politics into the classroom.”

  “In fact,” I say, “a number of people in this last election objected to Dick Cheney, our vice president, because he not only supported investment in South Africa, but opposed a bill supporting the ANC, or African National Congress, and voted against a resolution to free Nelson Mandela from imprisonment.” And now I was getting pissed. “He even went so far as to call Nelson Mandela a terrorist, which in my book is tantamount to calling Martin Luther King a terrorist.”

  Jack pursed his full lips and ran one hand across the front of his too-tight blue T-shirt. “Is that true?” he asked. “About the vice president?”

  “Look it up,” I tell him.

  Paige Prentiss made a tsk-tsk sound. “Maybe it’s true, but I don’t see how it relates to anything going on in the book. I think we’re supposed to be talking about July’s People, not Dr. Weatherall’s liberal agenda.”

  “It’s not my liberal agenda,” I said, equal parts shocked and awed at her nerve. “It’s history, and it’s relevant. There’s not always a clear separation between literature and politics. Look at the former Soviet Union, heck, look at America today. Poetry teachers at public high schools have lost their jobs for allowing students to write anti-war poems. Sounds awfully like fascism to me. And it’s not like I’m making this up about the vice president, he’s gone on record to say that if he had the chance, he wouldn’t have changed that vote. I don’t know about you, but that infuriates me. Now maybe that’s not relevant to this class, but where are we if we can’t have an open dialogue, if we can’t start on one place in the world, say South Africa, and investigate how it is or is not analogous to other situations? Civil Rights and black consciousness weren’t such unrelated movements.”

  Maybe Paige was just trying to goad me, or maybe she really was Satan in cutesy-wear, but next thing I hear out of her mouth is…

  “Well, we weren’t there, so maybe the vice president knew something about Nelson Mandela that we didn’t. Maybe the ANC were plotting some terrorist attack that none of us knew, and the vice president was looking out for Americans. Just because Nelson Mandela is popular now, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been in jail for a very good reason.”

  I could barely believe that I now had to explain the relevance, necessity and generally goodness of Nelson Mandela.

  “Nelson Mandela is one of the great leaders and peacemakers of our time. If you knew anything at all, you’d know that the ANC was actually considered conservative. Like Martin Luther King in America, as opposed to a Malcolm X.”

  Paige shrugged. The rest of the class was silent, and I calculated the time it would take to get two Excedrin in my system and stop the headache threatening to move from the back of my head straight through my eyeballs. No, there was no joy in Georgia that afternoon. And I could only imagine there would be a note waiting on my windshield in the not-so-distant future.

  Age may be nothing but a number, but there is a divide between youth and maturity that teachers are constantly called upon to negotiate. For instance, as much as I’d like to rip Paige’s head from her tiny frame, as much as she’s flat-out incorrect in many of her statements, I’m better off engaging with her than silencing her. Yet sitting in my office, the small bastion of kitsch in my newly adult lifestyle, surveying the Felix the Cat magnets on my file cabinet and Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox with its less than ironic confederate affiliations, I can’t help but wonder what’s happened to the youth of America. When I was in college, a liberal arts education meant challenging the ideas you’d been handed by your parents. I remember a class on social theory that I took where the professor announced, as though he’d received a memo directly from the source, that God was a myth, and wasn’t it nice that we’d all evolved past believing in such an antiquated archetype? This incredibly well-educated and authoritative man challenged what I believed. But at the end of the day, it was my job to weigh the different evidence and sources, and my beliefs were still my own. And if college was a place of same-sex kiss-ins, protests against U.S. policy in Africa, rabid vegans and sweatshop consciousness awareness, wasn’t that the point? To shock you out of complacency and challenge what you believe, so that when you left you could think critically and come closer to calling your ideas your own?

  “That bad?” Asa asks from the doorway of my office. “You look like they really put you through the wringer.”

  I motion her inside and she sits down, wrapping both legs beneath her, and stretches back into the leather armchair that I’d bought at a surplus store over the weekend. “Atlanta State’s a conservative school. I assume you’re used to that from Langsdale.”

  “I guess. I just always felt that in Langsdale the kids had an excuse. I mean, it was rural Indiana, for God’s sake. Half of them hadn’t even seen a black person live and in person until they got to college, and if they’d met a gay person, you can bet he was in the closet. These kids are bossy and…intractable. They won’t budge an inch from what they come into the classroom thinking. What’s that about? It’s like they arrived at college intent on not learning anything we have to say.”

  “I’d finally gotten used to the kids,” Asa says. “But now there’s this policing in place by the university, and it’s both distracting and offensive. I was telling my partner, David, about this the other night. Did you know that the university is actually allowing parents to monitor the classrooms? The rationale is that parents are paying for a product and they deserve to see where their hard-earned dollars are going. So not
only do I have no one in the administration backing me up, I have to contend with hostile students and hostile parents. I’d have taught high school if that were my goal.”

  I grunt in solidarity.

  “I really don’t know what I’d do without David these days. He’s coming by to walk me out to my car this evening. The note on the windshield left me quite shaken. I hate to say it, but there are times when having an evolved, loving man in one’s life makes all the difference.”

  Maybe I’m just paranoid, or lonely, but the “evolved, loving man” line from a smug partner makes me want to leave the room. I silently vow that if I am ever involved with an “evolved, loving man” I will have the sense and kindness not to rub it in the faces of those around me.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I say, trying to joke about it. “I seem only in possession of the broken-up-with and virtual kind.”

  Asa gives an ever so slightly condescending nod. I know this nod. It is the nod of the person who secretly believes that single women are immature and unable to figure out what they really want. Did I mention that I might be feeling paranoid?

  “Doris,” Asa says, gesturing behind me. “I want you to meet David.”

  I turn to face a tall, good-looking boyish man whose broad smile deflates within seconds of my facing him.

  “David,” I mutter, repeating the name to myself. “David.”

  “Uh, yeah,” he says. “Nice to meet you, Doris.”

  “Nice to meet you, David. Always nice to meet a David.”

  Asa gives me a look like I’m out of my mind.

  “But you know what,” I continue, “it’s funny, but to me you almost look more like an Andrew. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “Spooky,” Asa says. “Andrew is David’s middle name.”

  David is giving me a look that’s hate mixed with loathing and a side of “ha-ha—you think you’re a funny little smart-ass.”

  “You know what’s weird,” he says. “You look just like this flight attendant that I had when I traveled home the other week. I mean, you’re a little bigger than she was, but similar.”

  Asa hits him playfully in the stomach. “David,” she admonishes. But I can tell that she likes this gesture of complete and overt un-attraction for me.

  “We must both be psychic.” I smile and give a more than knowing gesture in David’s direction. “People are always telling me that I look like the fat version of some flight attendant.” Now Asa is looking at me as if I’m truly, totally, out of my mind, but I avoid meeting her eyes and stare straight at him. Because he and I both know that I’m way more than psychic, and what I know and Asa doesn’t is that this so-called “David” of hers (he’ll always be Andrew to me) is way, way less than evolved.

  ronnie

  I miss Doris. It’s great to be home, to be near old friends like Bita, but Bita’s married, which makes her a different genre of woman. To my mind, there are four genres of women: single/hetero, single/gay, married or mommy. And gay or hetero, once you’re in the married/mommy category, the single-with-no-kids category is a distant, distant memory. So Doris feels my pain. And I feel hers. We’re also two people who see eye to eye about a lot of things. We’re both pains in the asses when it comes to books and learning something, for God’s sake. If you’re a man, they consider you an intellectual. Well-read and well-informed. If you’re a chick, you’re better off keeping a lid on all that knowledge and keeping your mouth shut—unless you’re talking about looking for a man. Unlucky for us, we’re both too political for our own good; we’re both in charge of folks who do not give one ounce of shit about books or politics, and both of us are pathologically determined to make them give an ounce of shit.

  So the next time we talk, a few days after I’ve given Ian his TV-watching assignment, we trade war stories. I wasn’t surprised that she was having a hard time. Okay, really, I’m just using “hard time” as a euphemism for “flipping the fuck out.” Teaching is hard and underappreciated. Newsflash.

  “If there’s a God, I would like him to give me actual students who actually care, and if they don’t, they should just sit down, shut up, and do everything I say, anyway,” Doris rants. She has just gotten home from work, so the good times are still fresh in her head.

  “D.” I’m thinking about my own special hell with Ian. Who, as annoying and trying as he is, is a smart, interesting kid because his little demented wheels keep turning, even when he doesn’t want them to. “That’s not true. You’d be bored out of your mind teaching kids like that. Kids who’d agree with you in a robot monotone.” This Paige Prentiss sounded like a doozy. I imagine she and Ian getting together, towering over us, and crushing us with their thumbs. If you’re a teacher, kids who don’t care worry you about the future, but smart kids who could really do something with their smarts, but choose mediocrity, those are the ones who are really scary. Paige and Ian were scary, but they weren’t hopeless.

  “Maybe I’d be bored,” she admits. “Okay, yeah, I would, but it would be so much easier. I do have this one awesome student, Jack Moynihan. Not T., my gay fashionisto, but an honest-to-goodness frat boy with a conscience. Anyhow, he came to my office the other afternoon to tell me that he’s switching to English as his major. From business, so his parents might hunt me down and kill me, but it’s a small victory for critical thinking.”

  “Yeah, well. A drop in the ocean.”

  “True. I miss you and Earl. The new friend thing is stressful. I keep waiting for the crazy-bomb to drop with all these new folks.”

  “Why don’t you come to L.A.? Come have a little vacation with me and Earl.”

  “And sleep where? Between the two of you? That’d be cozy.”

  “Earl wouldn’t mind.” Earl would turn at least three shades of red if he heard me joking about this. You ladies, he’d say and shake his head as though he didn’t know what in the world to do with us.

  “No offense, but ew,” Doris says. “Not funny. Like sleeping with my sister’s husband, that would be. Besides, I’ve got my own man, kind of.”

  “Details,” I demand, and pour what has to be my fourth Diet Coke of the day. “I have a Coke habit. Ha-ha. I drink like, six a day.”

  “Well, quit it for a minute and maybe I’ll confess to meeting Mr. In The Meantime, this Maxwell I told you about.” I hear Doris opening and closing refrigerator and cabinet doors.

  “What are you eating?”

  “What am I not eating, is really the question.”

  “So vegan is okay, then?” I remember Doris telling me that little detail. I, personally, wouldn’t know what to do with a vegan. It’d be like dating someone who said they much preferred water to eating, and potato sacks to clothes. So much for my liberal “tolerance.”

  “We’ll see what the deal is,” Doris says, changing the subject. “Let’s just say my expectations are low, low, low.” I catch her up on Earl finally cracking, Bita possibly dumping Charlie, and my conclusion that Ian is a smart, smart little nightmare. She says, after hearing more stories about Ian, that she’ll never complain about her sweet angels in Atlanta again and that she had a spare crucifix she could put in the mail for me.

  “Promise you’ll think about L.A.,” I insist before we hang up. “Our couch is comfortable, I swear. Good to sleep on.”

  “You’ve already slept on your couch? Who pissed who off?”

  “No,” I said. “We’ve not slept on it.”

  “My second ew,’” Doris moans. “Time to hang up now. And you think about Atlanta. There’s lots of good food and not a hipster-with-a-screenplay in sight.”

  On the tip of my tongue was the makeup smear on Earl’s shirt. But I didn’t want to get into it, not really. Doris had already yelled at me once, had convinced me that I was being silly, that it could have been anyone who brushed up against Earl. But I’ve seen Earl bartend many, many times and he’s a stand behind the bar, strictly business kind of guy, not a mingle among the crowd, touchy-feely bartender. The obvious answer is that it’
s Katie’s makeup smudge—he’s been fighting her off. But still. It’s my Lady Macbeth-like obsession. I can’t get it out of my mind. Out, out, damn spot!

  “Hey. Did you hear me? I’m hanging up.”

  “Yeah. I heard you.”

  “What’s wrong over there?”

  “I saw something on Earl.”

  “What. Warts or something?”

  “Doris.”

  “Well? What then?”

  “Lipstick and makeup smudges on his shirt.”

  “Okay. That is a little weird. But that’s not Earl’s style. I know we’re both a bit kooky now, being uprooted and all that, but let’s not flip out completely. He could have an explanation, right? Maybe there was a bachelorette party or something.”

  “He was just so worked up the night I noticed it.”

  “Earl’s a big boy. Give him some credit. And don’t be such a girl. What are you, going to start digging in his pockets now, looking for clues?”