Eye to Eye Page 7

  August 31—Day one in the classroom.

  There is nothing quite like teaching to make one question the path one’s life has taken. My first class at Atlanta State University is American Literature, and having been only mildly shaken by the stalker-y note in my box, I am prepared to meet the issue of politics in the classroom head-on. What I realize upon entering the fluorescent glow of the bleakest and most dingy classroom I’ve seen since the two-dollar showing of Dangerous Minds, is that my students could almost assuredly not give two cents for what will come out of my mouth in the next hour. I’d say that twenty-eight of the thirty seats are filled, and unlike Langsdale’s farmboys, these students represent a far more polished demographic. Two women are texting furiously, three gentlemen in the back are actually sleeping, in the second row sits a woman who could be Paris Hilton’s more attractive twin, looking long, blond and expensive. Although she’s the genetic standout, they’re a good-looking crowd to a one.

  To steel my nerves I go to the chalkboard and write something that still feels alien, yet somehow empowering: DR. DORIS WEATHERALL, and underneath it, AMERICAN LITERATURE SURVEY. And then, to the right, I try to draw the “no politics in the classroom” symbol. I hear a weighted sigh from behind me like the air slowly leaking from an overfilled balloon, but turn to meet stone-faced silence.

  After a brief round of introductions, I gesture to the chalkboard and ask:

  “Does anyone know what this means?”

  “No P.C.,” says one of the former nappers, a tall, jockish young man with triple pierced ears and a barbed-wire tattoo on his arm below. Clearly this is an acronym with which these students are familiar, as I hadn’t even thought of shortening “politics in classroom” to “PC.”

  “Right. It’s Tommy, correct? Tommy Evans?”

  “Just T,” he responds. “The letter, T.”

  “Okay,” I say. “T. So I received a rather ominous and anonymous letter in my mailbox the other day.”

  Paris Hilton’s hand goes up.

  “Name first, please, I’m trying to get these down.”

  “Paige Prentiss,” she tells us. “And it’s not anonymous. Every new teacher received a greeting from the Concerned Conservatives for Constancy in the Classroom. It’s not meant to be threatening, it’s just a little tap on the shoulder.”

  All of this said in a Scarlett O’Hara, buttery-sweet as I twist the knife in your back, Southern accent. And, might I add, delivered in a tone so condescending that you’d have thought I was some hysterical nut-job ranting about creatures living in the yellow wallpaper.

  “You don’t think that an unsigned letter that reads ‘We are watching you,’ is hostile?” I ask.

  Ms. Prentiss shrugs and gives her best “what an idiot” look to the girl sitting next to her.

  “Then riddle me this, girl and boy wonders,” I say. “How does one create an apolitical English classroom? What’s the value of a liberal arts education if you can’t question and challenge what you’ve been taught and believe? For instance this American lit survey, I’m mandated to teach four texts and authors Ben Franklin, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain. You can see Gatsby, Huck Finn and Moby Dick on the syllabus. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love all three books, but why might a person consider this choice of books political?”

  (Chirping of crickets faintly heard in the distance.)

  “Okay. What do all of these books have in common?”

  Ms. Prentiss raises the lone hand. Curses!

  “They’re all classics of American literature.”

  “Yes,” I agree. “But so is Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, and so is Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”

  “All dead white men,” T. interrupts.

  “Correct. And when the only four required texts are dead white men, that sends a message. Every choice we make is political, the very act of what we bring into the classroom is political, so while I will never judge you or grade you on what you think or believe, there is simply no way to make this an apolitical space. If that’s what you’re looking for, I suggest you find another teacher and classroom.”

  Although I’m quite pleased with my rendition of today’s homily from the church of liberal humanism, with two minutes left, the notebooks are being closed and backbacks being non-discreetly zipped. “Okay, go on, we didn’t get to my Franklin intro, but next class, it’s all Franklin and the American dream. So get cracking.”

  On the way back to my office I pass the closed office door of Dr. Antonius Block, professor emeritus. He’s retired but for the occasional poetry workshop he teaches once every two years. Professor Block is one of the reasons I was most excited to get this job at Atlanta State. He’s the sort of prima-superstar that every department likes to have on their rosters regardless of how often they teach or how difficult they are with daily departmental duties. Antonius Block, who was born in the southernmost extremity of Mississippi, has claimed that not only did he pre-date Bergman’s knight, but that his parents wouldn’t have known enough to name him after the iconic figure if they tried. Block’s name fits his poetry: sparse, existential and merciless. Okay, to be fair, at times it’s most merciless to women, especially the not three but four women he’s been married to in his sixty-three years, but he’s the sort of artist that I forgive every bit of misogyny for, for the sake of his art.

  I’m reading the various articles posted on the front of Block’s office door. There’s critical praise for his National Book Award-winning collection of poems, the cover of his first book, which won the Yale younger poets prize, and a sarcastic cartoon about two cows reading poetry. Asa Davies comes out of her office, coffee cup in hand, and gestures dismissively at the brag sheets.

  “It’s as if Hitler were actually an artist with talent,” she says. “You know he hasn’t taught an actual class in three years, yet he’s managed to sleep with two undergraduates in that time.”

  “Really?” I say, pretending to be scandalized when I know this sort of behavior is far too routine to be scandalous. “But the man can write. His book of sonnets is the best since Hopkins.”

  Asa’s lips are pinched together. “Tell me how you like his sonnets when you’ve had the pleasure of a department meeting with him where he argues against every form of literary analysis since close readings. How was the first class?”

  “Okay,” I say, heading toward my office. “They’re an interesting crew.”

  “By interesting you mean slightly above root vegetables, right?”

  I smile, and try to remain positive. “I’d say they’re turnips at the very least.”

  After spending the next hour prepping for my evening class, I hear a faint knock on my half-opened door. Silhouetted in the door frame like some film noir movie star is Paige Prentiss, looking far less surly than she did in American lit. Let me stop for a moment to paint a better picture of Ms. Prentiss. Long blond hair curled Farrah-style, a Tiffany heart necklace around her neck that looks both authentic and platinum, white wifebeater tank-top, flowing aqua peasant skirt. I know from my lust-tour of the Nieman-Marcus shoe department that she’d managed to afford gold Chanel sandals which crisscrossed thinly up her calves, revealing perfectly manicured toes and a perfectly even mystic tan. She opens a large Coach bag (the straw tote trimmed in lime-green leather after which I salivated, but could also not afford) and faces me with a nose so straight, teeth so white, and eyes so blue that the Village of the Damned comes to mind. Paige Prentiss, whom, might I add, as one of my advisees, I had been looking forward to meeting because of her outstanding test scores and Phi Beta Kappa–level grades.

  “Take a seat,” I offer, gesturing at the empty chair across from my desk.

  “I just wanted to apologize,” she begins, smoothing her dress against her thighs and crossing her legs demurely at the ankles. “I’d so been looking forward to meeting you, and I know that you’re my advisor, as well, but so many of the professors here are disrespectful about the beliefs of others, and I assumed from
the way you started the class that you were one of them. But I really like the books you’ve picked, and I can’t wait to get started reading them. Dead white men and all.” And then she whispers conspiratorially, “And it’s nice to have at least one woman around here who knows how to dress like a lady and not some angry feminist.”

  “I may not be angry,” I tell her, trying not to lose my cool. “But I am most definitely a feminist.”

  Paige shrugs, looks at my trim pencil skirt with the slightest flare at the bottom, and says, “Well, at least you don’t look like one.”

  Arrrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

  “I came to see you because I do so want to graduate with honors, Ms. Weatherall, and I want to make sure that I do whatever it takes in your class to make an A.”

  “Dr. Weatherall,” I correct her. “And you’ll get an A in my class if you show up for all the classes, do the homework, write brilliantly and participate actively.” First day of class and the grade-grubbing has already begun.

  “Yes,” she acknoweldges, as though the title were somehow unseemly. “Dr. Weatherall. It’s just that you look so much like a Ms.”

  And then she gives me a smile as if I’d been knighted. No wonder she has such glowing letters on file from the male faculty. She was playing me like I was judging Miss Georgia Peach.

  “Well, I worked very hard to become a doctor.”

  “Yes, I saw your book of poems. I thought that one about shoes was sweet. I think that women ought to be allowed to write books about shoes if they like. You’d never know it goin’ to school here.”

  Who did this child think she was?

  “Well, Miss Prentiss. If you read the poem carefully, I think you’d have noticed that it was about more than shoes. There’s careful attention to class and class markers in that poem. Manolo slides versus department-store copies…” I was starting to sound defensive. “And the rest of the poems are hardly about shoes.”

  “Oh, that,” she says. “That whole tired class thing. Lord, you try escaping this place without a whole wagon-load of that hooey. That’s why I felt I had to say something in class today, I get so tired of it all. Dr. Block says it’s only the words on the page that matter, not what your professors try to slop on it. Some mornings I wake up and wonder if this is America or communist Russia.”

  She smiles at me, and for the first time I see the intelligence behind the act—the Paige Prentiss who could score 1460 on her SATs and still play Scarlet for anyone willing to watch. It wasn’t a pretty sight. And then it vanished.

  “I guess I’ll be seein’ you in class,” she concludes, extending her hand. “French sandals and all.”

  I honestly don’t know whether she means her sandals or my own, so after she leaves my office I untuck my right shoe and check for the brand. LaParda. My latest designer shoe warehouse purchase. I assumed the shoes were the dollar-store equivalent of deodorants marked “Seekret” or “Shure,” but evidently these shoes are not your everyday knockoffs, but super-deluxe knockoffs. Faux French Prada. So either Ms. Prentiss was speaking narcissistically, or she was making fun of me. Looked to me like the two of us would be gearing up for a real brand war at the O.K. Corral. An age-old showdown between money and irony, “the real world” and academia. Chanel, one; LaParda, zero.

  “Doing research?” I hear from the doorway.

  I look up to see Asa, who has clearly had some Sibyl-like personality change since the last two times that I’ve seen her. She’s smiling, and I realize that she’s one of those women whose face totally transforms when she’s in a good mood. She was an effortlessly pretty, cherub-faced platinum blonde—hair cut in a chic but functional short bob. She had on salmon-colored Capri pants and a pale beige shirt and a pair of Birkenstocks that I knew were part of the Heidi Klum line, designed to bring a bit of glam to the hippie-set.

  “I’m sorry that I sounded so curt in the hallway,” she states. “It’s been a crazy month for reasons I don’t want to bore you with, and I’ve been overtaxing myself trying to make my postcolonial literature class perfect, the syllabus at any rate. I had a rough time of it last year. You’d think that the complaints coming from the students would be beneath notice, but I spend more time in meetings defending my teaching last spring than I did teaching. It creates a mean environment. I don’t want you to feel like the department is poison your first weeks here. We should have a drink once things calm down and talk about Atlanta. I’m doing a nonfiction essay class this semester, as well, so I can pick your brain about that.”

  “Great. I understand. It was a little creepy getting that letter in the mail my first day. But I have only good memories of how encouraging your were last year during my campus visit. You had longer hair then, no?”

  “Impossible to keep long hair in the Atlanta summer, but my partner likes it.”

  “Partner” is academic speak for any and all of the following: husband, wife, lover, boyfriend, girlfriend, live-in help, fellow writer. So, while in the real world “partner” signals “alternative lifestyle,” in academia, it simply means that said person is fluent in the über-PC parlance of the day. Now I have to play the pronoun game.

  “My ex-boyfriend,” I say, calling Zach an “ex” out loud for the very first time, “wouldn’t have noticed if I’d shaved my head. Or he would have been really utilitarian about it—less money on shampoo and no hairballs in the shower.”

  Asa groaned.

  “David, my partner, he’s finishing his sociology dissertation at Emory. We try to keep fighting to a minimum, since he now meditates an hour every day before approaching the keyboard. It’s probably good. It keeps me from complaining about the Paige Prentisses of my day.”

  “Omigod,” I say. “Is she, like, the well-dressed spawn of Satan?”

  “Worse.” Asa moves from the doorway and sits where Paige had sat only moments before. “She heads the Concerned Conservatives, and even once suggested they not allow anyone in who wasn’t Christian, but they didn’t want to not appeal to the Hitler youth of all faiths. Don’t let her fool you with that accent and posturing. The double-C’s are a hundred percent behind that bill of rights for students. They even had an article about Atlanta State in the Chronicle. It’s like they want to go back to the days when you couldn’t even read Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye. Don’t even think of assigning Carol Churchill. I had parents coming into my office over that one. Parents. Is this high school or a liberal arts education? It’s Big Brother all over again. Or in Paige’s particular instance, little sister.”

  I put my hands to my ears in genuine disgust.

  “I thought this would be better than Indiana. Politically speaking. And when did Christian become synonymous with conservative? As an occasionally practicing Catholic, I resent that.”

  Asa tucks her right leg underneath her left thigh in a yogalike posture.

  “Don’t worry about getting lumped in,” Asa says. “I talked to Paige about it once and she’s quite sure that the Catholics are Mary-worshippers headed straight for hell. She just doesn’t think it’s polite to say so. This was when I tried talking to Paige. She loved that I was a lapsed Episcopalian. She seemed to think that she’d get brownie points in heaven for talking to me about Jesus. Of course, since I received my official letter of complaint, we don’t talk about much of anything anymore. Believe you me, there’s nothing terrifically spiritual about the double-C’s. And nothing Christian about Paige Prentiss.”

  “I have her in two of my classes. Just had her in American lit, and I saw that she’s in my advanced poetry workshop tomorrow.”

  Asa makes as though a cold shiver is running through her body. “I can loan you cyanide.”

  “The worst thing,” I say, “is that her poetry does not, in fact, suck. I got a few poems in advance for the first day, and hers were among the best. They’re not about anything, but they don’t suck.”

  Spoken by a woman who writes about her shoes, I think, hoping Asa isn’t thinking the same.

 
“In my opinion,” Asa mimics, her speech decidedly more clipped, “if it’s not about anything, then it sucks. Period.”

  The words of a true post-colonialist. Asa pronounces sucks as if she found it in the dictionary for uneducated Neanderthals, right after booby and neato. I make a mental note: tone down the casual lingo while at work. I’m no longer going to be forgiven the fact that I can discuss Freud and Lacan in late-eighties Valley-speak. Ronnie and I used to discuss literary theory Romy and Michelle style. “Like, how totally demented is Freud with his clearly misogynist, totally un-self-reflexive hysteria horseshit? Tony Soprano has more self-awareness. And before I go off on his repressed blow-job mania, did you check out those shoes on Zappos?” No, that will no longer fly in my professorial incarnation. Asa has ever so gently, every so placidly, let me know that use of the word sucks, on the job, is clearly not cute, not postmodern, and definitely not “academic.”

  The next two weeks of school are lonely but uneventful. Asa does little more than say “howdy” in the hall, and Toni has twice promised an evening out trolling for single men, but has had deadlines come up each time. Her parrot, though, has branched out in his imitations to add to his repertoire an emphysema-like cough that he evidently picked up “in the crack house.” I have looked longingly at a number of ads for dogs, but haven’t been able to commit. Besides, none of the classifieds have yet to seduce me with, “rarely barks, housetrained, has a taste for birds.” And like a total idiot, while I have committed good amounts of my time to watching television, I always have an ear out for the phone, half hoping that Zach will call and tell me that he made a mistake, that he’s moving to Atlanta, and that my fears of dying alone have all been as silly as grown women in miniskirts and leggings.

  The sad truth: yesterday I saw a thirty-five-year-old in black leggings and a jeans skirt cut just below the ass, and my phone has not been dancing off the hook.