The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(11)
The front row nodded; the others stared. Several girls took out sheets of lined paper and wrote The American Dream across the top, then looked up at her for more. Finally a hand crept up in the front row. Its owner, Amelia, had rapidly blinking eyes and a frown of bangs over her forehead.
“Yes?” Molly asked hopefully.
Amelia looked at her phone and recited, “The American Dream refers to the equal opportunity for every American to achieve success through ingenuity and hard work.”
Molly had been warned about this: apparently the modern teenager preferred to live outside of knowledge, or to skim along its edges by way of Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and the basic Google search. She nodded. “Okay, yes. Thanks. Can we put the phones away for a minute? What I want to know is, what does it mean to you?” Again they said nothing, merely shifted in their seats. “What are some things that one would aspire to achieve or attain?”
“Good grades?” guessed a girl in the front.
“A Lambo?” asked a boy in the second row.
“Maybe a personal assistant?” another girl offered. “Who follows you around all the time and, like, does stuff for you?”
“A private jet!” called a back-row boy, and another sang out:
“Fly like a G6!”
The class laughed, the room relaxed. Molly said, “So we’re thinking of lots of material things. That’s interesting. How about a safe home? A rewarding career?”
“Obviously,” said Amelia.
“Now, do you think every American has the opportunity to have these things?”
“If they get a job,” said a boy in the middle.
“Well…” Molly had been trained not to lecture her students, but to use the Socratic approach, questioning them until they reached true insights on their own. In theory this approach was noble; in practice it was a little exhilarating and a little terrifying, like steering her subcompact through a storm. “What kinds of jobs are available to most people?”
“Whatever kind,” Amelia said with a shrug. “If you want something, you just have to go for it.”
“I don’t know what Ima do, but I’ll be successful at it,” a back-row boy called out, apropos of nothing.
“I’m gonna be a lawyer,” said another. “They make bank.”
“You know you have to know how to read to get that job, right?”
“Ha-ha. Shut up, chach.”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Molly took a breath and began again. “We seem to be a little unsure about the state of the American Dream today. That’s fine. That’s good! Let’s continue thinking about this as we look at Fitzgerald’s critique of the Dream in his era. You all have your Gatsbys, right?” Before more could be said, she split the students into groups and asked them to locate a relevant passage in chapter one. Soon the classroom hummed with conversations, the front-row girls tugging the rest along. It felt like a minor miracle. Engaged with the literature, the students must have been feeling what Molly had felt in the rare unlonely moments of her childhood: when discussing Gatsby in an English class, or reading Jane Eyre by flashlight, the gears of her life would click into place, the lock release, and she would be revealed, simply and wholly herself. But after five minutes, the groups began to dissolve—books were down, phones were out, boys were stabbing one another with pencil ends. She quieted them.
“Now, I need one person from each group to tell us about the ideas you’ve come up with. Who’d like to go first?”
At the front of the room, a girl raised her hand and stood up. She was skinny and short, with a governess face (narrow, gray-eyed) and a gorgeous riot of black curls.
“Yes, thank you?” Molly said.
“Abigail.”
“Thank you, Abigail. What did you guys come up with?”
Abigail explained that she’d finished reading the book over winter break and so was prepared to speak beyond the first chapter. Before Molly could stop her, the girl launched into a monologue explaining the problematic revisioning of the American Dream in the twentieth century as related to the parties at Gatsby’s mansion. She spoke with the uninspired authority of a SparkNotes entry, projecting dutifully to the room in a voice that never wavered or changed in pitch, pointing out precisely the passages that any English teacher would have chosen, making exactly the arguments that any college English major would make. Her own group members watched her, impressed and perplexed by all the ideas they’d supposedly discussed. The rest of the class clutched their iPhones resentfully or rested their chins on their fists.
At last Molly had to interrupt her: “Excellent, Abigail. Thank you so much. Why don’t I read one of those passages out loud, so we can all see what you’re saying about the rise of materialism?”
Abigail shrugged and returned to her seat. The room exhaled. At the whiteboard, Molly opened her book and began to read. She loved to read aloud, the way the words, pronounced, surrounded and sheltered her:
“By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.”