Eye to Eye Page 3

  Okay, before everyone runs screaming at the somewhat pretentious comparison of my life to Ezra Pound’s, let me tell you why I think an old-school poet like Pound is an appropriate model for a woman like me, why “d,” dear readers, is the correct answer to today’s multiple-choice pop quiz. As poetic mandates go, what could be more appropriate than “Make it New,” especially when being a professor-professional poet requires that you uproot your life, choose between your job and your boyfriend and start brand-new in a brand-new city at the less-than-tender age of thirty-two?

  Pound believed in the power of image, so let me start by giving a few from the past three weeks of my life. First, August 10, me, packing up the shards of sanity that still remain from seven years of graduate school in Langsdale, Indiana, where I recently completed my Ph.D. in poetry writing. It’s almost as useful in real-world terms as devoting one’s life to the study of foam patterns at the top of cappuccinos versus lattes. I use this metaphor largely because failed Ph.D.s in poetry often find themselves intimately reacquainted with the making of coffee—although I must say that my sisters at Starbucks might have a benefits package to rival that of my new employer, Atlanta State University. Into my trunk went the spoils of years spent shopping cleverly at flea markets for the perfect blend of kitsch and acceptable adult decoration. My signed Marilyn Monroe framed picture from a yard sale in Terre Haute, although it may have only been signed by the three-year-old running around in a saggy pair of underwear and “Got Milk” T-shirt; a formica coffee table set with red chairs and slightly rusted aluminum legs (and fifties styling to rival June Cleaver’s, might I add), and more, all loaded up in Indiana, and unloaded in Atlanta, Georgia, into my swanky midtown loft where I stare at them and wonder if I am actually a nouveau Beverly-hillbilly. Can I make this work? Can the old me become new again?

  Image number two, this from only a couple of days ago: August 27, on the cusp of the first day of class and me, lost and frustrated on the streets of Atlanta. I had been trying to find the newly opened Ikea, and wound up somehow driving twenty miles past it to Marietta, where I encountered a giant mechanical chicken the size of a three-story building—the “big chicken” of “you are officially outside the Atlanta city limits” fame. Knowing I was lost, I pulled into the parking lot of the Army-Navy surplus store, only to be greeted by a row of “Yankee, go home” bumper stickers, which I couldn’t help but take personally—and at the same time, I felt like gesturing at them and saying I WISH I COULD EVEN FIND MY STUPID HOME. A perfectly nice gentleman behind a counter of death stars gave me polite directions back into the city, and I tried hard not to sound like the displaced New Yorker that I am.

  The euphoria of the initial move had worn thin, and all of my excitement at having found a job was slowly being replaced by the thought that making new friends in one’s thirties was not as easy as doing so in one’s twenties. My next-door neighbor, a funky singleton of about my age, had mentioned drinks, but hadn’t followed through yet. I had gone to three coffee shops before I realized that one couldn’t simply sit at a coffee shop and expect to make friends—that smiling at strangers merely made one look deranged, not friendly. Ditto for the same behavior at power-yoga, my other attempt to be social. Although there were some nice-looking men, particularly one bald, black man who could have been Michael Jordan’s twin, whose downward dog was a thing to behold—but I digress. That, plus I am separated by the entire contiguous United States from my best friend of the past half-decade, and I am not one of those writers who enjoys ongoing solitude. Solitude makes me cut weird bangs, overpluck my eyebrows and eat too many Nutter Butters.

  Driving back from the outer edges of the city, the only thing that kept me from weeping in frustration at the glacial pace of traffic was the knowledge that Zach, my boyfriend of three years, was arriving in seventy-two hours to help transition me into my new life. So when I finally re-entered my apartment, the one spot of familiarity and comfort in Atlanta, I had moved past relief to gratefulness at the sight of Zach’s number on my caller ID. Zach, calling to tell me that “things had come up,” and he wasn’t going to be able to drive from Langsdale, Indiana, to Atlanta, Georgia. “We’ll talk later in the week,” he said. “I can tell you’re tired, and I don’t want to upset you more.”

  Image number three: this, today, August 29, the day before my debut at Atlanta state as Dr. Doris Weatherall. The “money shot” of the entire move was my entering the building that houses the English department to start a job where I am no longer grad-school-wastrel and Oprah-watcher Doris Weatherall, but fully bona fide assistant professor, Dr. Doris Weatherall, with attendant adult salary and health plan. In honor of my confirmed adulthood, I am wearing a Katherine Hepburn–worthy ensemble of grey tailored pants, white shirt and Pradalike naughty-conservative lace-up shoes with decidedly nonsensible heel. I moved up from Miss Clairol to the Aveda salon, and my hair is dyed a rich red-brown and cut in long layers that reach about an inch below my shoulder.

  I feel glamorous and professional.

  For about five minutes.

  The glamour wears off after I drop my books in my office and go back down the hall to my mailbox. On top of the various catalogs and beginning-of-school calendars sits a letter, with DORIS W. scrawled in serial-killer-like spidery writing across the front of the envelope. I open the envelope to see what looks like a hand-stamped logo of CLASSROOM in gigantic capital letters, with the middle of the letters slightly hollowed out to fit the word politics in small letters. Circled around the writing is a thick, red line with a slash through it, similar to the implied “no” in “no smoking” signs. Even creepier, below it, in the same handwriting are the words, “We are watching you. Watch yourself!”

  From behind me, I hear, “That’s what they didn’t tell you about during your campus visit.” A thin blonde whom I vaguely remember from my interview last winter as Dr. Asa Davies takes the sheet of paper from my hand and traces her finger around the red circle. “No politics in the classroom—get it? And be warned, they have moles in all the classrooms. They actually tried to sue me last year, but it got thrown out of the kangaroo campus court. I teach postcolonial lit. Try keeping politics out of that. I suppose I should change my reading of Robinson Crusoe to explain how Friday found his true calling and learned his place in the brave, new, Eurocentric world. Welcome to Atlanta State University, where the inmates have a hand in running the asylum. Like I said, things they never tell you about on your campus visits.”

  She shrugs her shoulders, and then, like some academic oracle, she turns and disappears down the hall.

  I fold the paper in half and put it in my new tote bag, a gift from Zach when I first secured this job. Before taking any job, candidates go on “campus visits,” where they are put through a rigorous round of interviews, job talks, and given a chance to see what the campus is like for themselves. And while helpful, campus visits are sort of like first dates. Unless the school is beyond help, they put on their best face and pitch as much woo as an underfunded state university can. I knew that the student body was conservative as a whole, and I knew that there had been some stirrings in the Georgia legislature as to what should be taught in the classrooms. This is a state, after all, where they put stickers on high school science books, saying “evolution is a theory”—which, I assume is also inside the textbooks, as “theory” is scientific for “all but written in stone truth.” I figured that as a poet I could fly under the radar, but it would appear that I had figured wrong.

  I return to my office, a concrete block with cell-like rectangular windows ringing the top—enough windows to let light in, but not enough to see the goings-on of the world outside. Atlanta State University is located on the northwest side of Atlanta in a block of buildings that could only be converted housing projects. I was shocked when I first saw my “office,” a cubicle that might just as easily have been used to interrogate prisoners in some Escape from Atlanta–style Kurt Russell TNT late-night urban guerilla warfare movie. It’s no ivo
ry tower—it’s not even any Langsdale University, for that matter, which, while rural and threatening to unleash the children of the corn, was truly beautiful.

  The address for the university is deceptive. When I was mailing out applications, twenty-eight in all, to every job for which I was qualified within a thirty-mile radius of a large metropolitan area, Atlanta State University on Peachtree Grove Avenue sounded idyllic. I had images of a hip-but-lush campus, cordoned off from the city, with actual peach trees from which I might nab a late-afternoon snack. Never mind that I’d never seen a peach tree. Never mind that I now know that calling anything “Peachtree” in Atlanta is somewhat akin to naming a baby boy Mohammed in the Muslim world, or calling helpless newborns “Apple” or “Roman.” No peach trees bloom on Atlanta State University’s campus. In fact, only a smattering of sad, straggly saplings all but grope for light between evenly-spaced gaps of pavement lining the streets nearby. But in the academic job market, a job is a job, and by the time they offered me a position, teaching poetry no less, it was yes-I-said-yes-I-will-yes. Yes.

  My office is newly painted, a periwinkle-blue that I hope will make me creative and productive. Half-unpacked boxes of books have all been shoved against the walls, cramping me into the middle of the room. I’ve been provided with a computer and a phone, three chairs and a minirefrigerator that looks as if it was thrown away from a dorm in the midsixties. I lean back in one of the chairs and prop my feet on the refrigerator, looking again at the “We are watching you. Watch yourself.” Not exactly words to warm one’s heart.

  What the neo-Nazis are about to find out, however, is that I, Doris Weatherall—Dr. Doris Weatherall—am nothing if not a contrarian. When all the world is wearing platform heels, I schlep around in ballet flats. When the “natural look” demands a clear and overglossed lip, I slather on the 1950s movie-star reds, vamping my pout to the absolute max. And when some bossy campus fascists tell me not to talk about politics in my classroom, I redesign my opening speech to address the topic directly.

  This semester I am teaching “Introduction to American Literature,” “Beginning Poetry Writing,” and the upper-level seminar on “World Literature.” But the first class of the day tomorrow is American lit—perfect venue for discussing the nature of politics in the classroom. I lock my door and open a copy of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, looking for a way to tie the week’s first reading with my rant about free speech and a liberal arts education. My computer chimes gently in the background, letting me know that Ronnie is awake and online. I open my IM screen.

  ME: Are you awake? The McCarthyists are alive and well and living in Atlanta. I got a letter in campus mail telling me not so nicely to keep my big liberal trap shut. I guess it’s back to poems about trees and birdies.

  RONNIE: There have got to be better ways to make a living. Are we too old to learn pole dancing?

  ME: I am pretty sure that I am. I’m not even sure I’m capable of learning basic yoga. How’s Earl?

  RONNIE: Asleep. We see each other two waking hours a day. How are you settling in? Meet any new neighbors?

  ME: I have an exotic bohemian living next door. I am going to try to make her be my friend and teach me to dress for the city. Hard to meet new people here. I think I’m going to get a dog. Both for a friend and protection from potential campus Nazis.

  RONNIE: You mean some rat dog?

  ME: I mean a small but fiercely protective dog. By the way. I strongly suspect that I am about to get dumped.

  RONNIE: Whaaaaattt?

  ME: Well, I got “let’s take some time off-ed,” which is the last stop before dumpsville. I am trying to repress this information completely, as it will only give me a mini-nervous breakdown for which I truly have no time.

  RONNIE: Why? What’s going on with Zach? Did anything lead up to it?

  ME: (now feeling sad) Everything led up to it. I’ll call you later. Must prep Ben Franklin for tomorrow.

  RONNIE: Sounds like a party.

  ME: Ha-ha.

  After signing off from IM, I put the Ben Franklin aside and unpack one of the boxes marked “OFFICE.” A mug swaddled in newswrap sits atop two piles of books. I unwrap it to find the gag gift that Zach bought me as a joke on our first-year anniversary. The words on the mug read, “OPPOSITES ATTRACT, THEN THEY DRIVE EACH OTHER CRAZY.” Funny, and unfortunately, prophetic. Zach and I “met cute” almost six years ago, if by cute you mean that I got really sloshed on pink wine and kissed him because he looked like Harvey Keitel, and he kissed me back because he and his girlfriend were “on a break.” Then we avoided each other for two years, followed by an intense month of summer teaching where we were thrown together by the forces that be, and our Hepburn/Tracy antics eventually gave way to love. Zach and I knew each other for a while before we started dating, and like any adults in a relationship, we learned to overlook each other’s faults. I learned to love a man who groomed his toenails in public, and he learned the subtle difference between a pencil skirt from Old Navy and a pencil skirt mailed to me from my sister in New York, post-Barney’s sample sale. I went to my first jam band concert, and he got his first haircut that cost more than twenty dollars. Though by the end of our third year together, the differences were starting to wear—not so much the superficial differences, but my anality versus his total lack of motivation. The straw before the final straw probably came my last evening in Indiana.

  “It’s only going to be Langsdale with accents,” Zach told me at the Saloon. We were at the local watering hole with Ronnie and Earl, my best friend and her ersatz-hillbilly boyfriend, a Langsdale local who had actually agreed to follow Ronnie to the West Coast for love. It was all I could do to get Zach to follow me back to my apartment at night.

  “Nothing wrong with accents,” Ronnie said, squeezing Earl playfully beneath the chin.

  “You better make sure to eat up when you get there,” Earl said. “Looks to me like you’re wastin’ away, Doris.”

  Earl was right. Between arguing with Zach about his latest career change—opening an old movie theater to show classic films in Langsdale, instead of finishing his dissertation—and thinking about a new job, the move, everything, I’d been forgetting to eat. And not to go off on Zach, but do the words NO MARKET mean anything to anyone? Selling vintage movies to the locals seemed to me a uniquely vexed venture akin to opening a designer boutique next to the Wet Seal and expecting the tweens to come running. You can’t just walk in and sell tofu burgers to a meat-and-potato populous. Don’t even get me started.

  “There’s no danger of Doris starving,” Zach said. “Believe me.”

  Hmm. Zach stood up and stretched, then headed for the men’s room.

  “Sooooo,” Ronnie asked, “A little trouble in paradise? What are you going to do about the move?” Earl’s brows knit together with concern. Ronnie and Earl were wearing matching black T-shirts from a Tom Waits concert they’d attended in Chicago, a fashion accident, but proof that they were on the same wavelength. A reminder of how far off Zach and I had gone—his hippie sine running counter to my urban cosine. That night, Zach was wearing Birkenstocks to my Charles David, a Target T-shirt to my Betsey Johnson baby-doll dress, and patchouli to my Hypnotic Poison. No, things were not going well.

  Things hadn’t, in fact, been going well for the past few months. They had been made worse by a trip in late July to Atlanta where we both sweated for about three days straight and looked for a place for me to live. A brief snapshot from the visit:

  “I like this place,” Zach had said, when we were shown the ever-so-chi-chi loft, with exposed brick walls and tin roofing in which I now live. The building seemed quiet and well maintained.

  “It’s a studio,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m a studio-loft kinda gal. And where are you going to put your stuff?”

  Zach sighed. He’d grown his hair out long, a little longer than I like it, and had it knotted in a lazy ponytail. When he went to run his hand through it, it got stuck.

  “Didn’t we a
lready talk about this? I thought we talked about this.”

  “No,” I say. “I started to talk about it, and you started drinking, and you said things would all work out, and I said that I was getting older and might want a kid and marriage, and even if I didn’t, that you still can’t just drift and job jump forever. Is this ringing any bells?”

  “That?” he said. “I’ve almost forgiven you for that conversation. Just let things be, Doris.”

  “I can’t just let things be, Zach. And don’t give me some faux-Buddhist crap about not pushing the river or letting flow rule one’s life. I’m totally hippied out.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  There are certain phrases that are never part of a healthy relationship, such as “We need to talk. I’d like you if…”, “You remind me of my mother,” and of course, “What’s that supposed to mean?” (Frankly, I’d add “You’d do it if you loved me” when related to any and all less-than-kosher sexual experimentation, but that’s a totally different story. I broke up with a boyfriend once during a stunning argument that ended with me yelling “I intend to take my ass-virginity to my grave.” I suppose in this day and age that makes me a bit of a prude. So be it.)

  Anyway, the issue at hand is bickering. Zach and I were bickering. And once you become a bickersome couple, it’s a short ride to bitter and trapped.

  “Forget it,” I replied, the fear of a potential break-up beginning to feel very, very real. “I was kidding about the hippie thing. Stop being so sensitive.”

  And “stop being so sensitive.” Another definite no-no. We’d gone from a fun, opposites-attract academic thrill ride of a couple, to a Lifetime movie-of-the-week, complete with recycled dialogue and the occasional semipublic tantrum. There were moments when I actually thought that all our story needed was a B-list actress to banish us forever to made-for-TV movie hell.