The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(14)
She stopped at the copy machine, over which Molly’s papers were strewn, and turned to ask the room, “Who belongs to these?”
Molly stood up. “Sorry, let me take care of that.”
“Beth, this is Molly Nicoll, our new English teacher,” Gwen called out from her seat. “She’s replaced Jane Frank. You remember the Jane disaster.”
“Do I?” the woman asked.
Gwen smiled tightly. “Molly,” she said, “this is Beth Firestein. She directs our AP English program.”
“It’s great to meet you,” Molly said. She hurried over to Beth Firestein and offered her hand.
Beth was petite, although she didn’t seem so. Straight bangs framed a heart-shaped face with features that were small and finely drawn: dark eyes winged by crow’s-feet, delicate ears, and a serious mouth. Her handshake was firm and dry. Molly noticed that her fingernails were manicured, shell pink, impeccable.
“You are a fan of Lawrence,” Beth said coolly. Her eyes were on the handouts Molly had made—Lawrence’s “Give Her a Pattern,” an essay she intended to use as a launching point to discuss Gatsby and Daisy and the romantic ideal.
“Oh, yes.”
“Conrad says that the novels of D. H. Lawrence are nothing but obscenities and filth.”
Molly hesitated, gathering her papers. Finally she said, “If depicting women as real human beings is obscene, then I guess he is. But I think he’s wonderful. No one, except maybe Woolf, wrote more beautiful sentences.”
“Yes,” Beth said, nodding. “You are right about that.”
Molly beamed. Not since college graduation had her literary opinions been sought out and approved of.
Beth withdrew a sheet of paper from her leather folder and began her copy run. “How are you settling in?”
“All right, thanks. I had some trouble setting up my email account, but that’s the only glitch so far.”
“Oh, I don’t do email.”
“Aren’t we required to? In case our students need to get in touch with us?”
Beth waved Molly’s question away; the question was a fly that annoyed her. She pulled another paper from her folder and placed it on the tray. “Where did you say that you studied?”
“Fresno State,” Molly answered. “Where I grew up.”
“And the Fresno schools aren’t hiring?”
“I needed to try out a different place. I mean, I needed to be different.”
Beth did not answer. As the machine hummed, spit out papers, she squared off the copies and slid them into her leather folder. Molly hugged her own bale of papers to her chest. She saw she had been too honest, revealed too much, as she always seemed to do.
Finally Beth said, “It’s only geography, dear.”
Molly nodded respectfully at this, but inside she bristled. If a person’s life could not change—if a person could not change—then what was the point of it all? Maybe Beth, admirable as she was, had been worn down by years of service, had grown complacent. Maybe Molly would remind her what was possible.
—
In the following weeks, Molly woke each day at six-thirty, arrived at school by seven-fifteen, checked her mailbox in the faculty lounge, made copies, and opened her classroom before the students arrived. She tested her lessons on her Period One class, which had become her favorite by virtue of being her first; she told many jokes that didn’t go over and a few that did; she paced madly in front of the whiteboard with the purple marker in her grip (like that line she loved from Eliot, “a madman shakes a dead geranium”); she scribbled. After her lectures she split the kids into discussion groups and then circled the room, weaving around the desks, pausing to rest a hand on a student’s shoulder, to lean down and listen in, to throw a question or opinion into the mix. At times she felt she and her kids were truly connecting: at times she felt they were understanding not just the books they were meant to be reading but Molly’s own secret heart, and she wanted to weep with joy. Just as often, there was defeat. There were times Molly heard herself lecturing about a passage, her voice sliding from authoritative to appreciative to rhapsodic, saw the smirks on the kids’ faces and felt as if she’d read her diary out loud. There were kids, like Abigail Cress, who seemed to have no love for learning yet badgered her constantly for A’s. There were kids, like Damon Flintov, who never, ever did their homework, no matter how many extensions she granted. There were kids, like Amelia Frye, who texted all through class, and believed her blind enough not to notice or callous enough not to care. Sometimes a student (Ryan Harbinger) would actually fall asleep, and Molly would feel responsible for having bored him, and also hate him and then hate herself for hating him. There were moments when all was calm and quiet, kids reading at their desks, and then the class would dissolve in laughter and she’d have absolutely no clue why. These moments would haunt her lonely weekends, would wake her in the silence of her studio apartment in the middle of the night. In some ways, her students knew so much more than she did, possessed vast, secret stores of information, codes and connections, that she felt helpless to understand. When she circled the room, she’d peer over their shoulders at the phones in their palms, catching flashes of photos and texts. What were they doing? she wondered. What lives were they living on those little screens?
She spent the breaks cleaning up her classroom and listening to students’ excuses for the homework they did poorly or not at all, or traversing the campus on invented errands, mostly avoiding the faculty lounge. She ate lunch while marking papers at her desk, stayed after school to hear more excuses and requests, then hurried to the conference room for the various meetings to which she was called. Finally, at five or six in the evening, she drove home to resume what was without question the worst part of her job: the Sisyphean tasks of grading and emailing. After dinner of salad or soup at her kitchen counter, she graded assignments and quizzes for an hour or two, then logged in on the district-provided laptop to answer emails from her students and, more often, their parents, tutors, and educational consultants.