The Middlesteins: A Novel(4)

Whatever, it was just hair. She didn’t need to touch it. She had her own hair, which was plenty soft on its own, black, curly, long, springy, wiry, but still soft.

And anyway, then there was the rest of him, the belly bloated by the yellow-amber-brown stuff, slung low and wide over the belt of his pants, his own personal air bag; the droopy, faded flannel shirts, with the holes in the cuffs and the pockets; the white-blue jeans and corduroys with the frayed knees; the Converse high-tops with the tape around the bottoms to keep the soles on. The bloodshot eyes. The torn cuticles. The amount of time he spent online. (Sure, it was his job, but still it concerned her.) The only time he left the house was to go to this bar, or when Robin dragged him on walks in warmer weather.

“Your boyfriend Daniel,” is what her roommate, Felicia, called him.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she would say back.

“You sure act like it,” Felicia would say. “What do you talk about on those walks of yours?”

They talked about her mother. Just like they were doing now.

“I don’t know how to help her,” she said.

“I think you just have to be there for her,” he said.

She knew that was what she was supposed to do, but every time she took that train home, and the view slowly transformed from the high, gleaming architecture of downtown Chicago in the distance to the swirling mass of strip-and mini-and mall-malls that defined the burbs—there was more to the suburbs, she knew that, but that was all she could ever see anymore, her view obscured by a combination of prejudice and neurosis—a deep depression began to constrict her.

If she had never moved back to Chicago from New York, none of this would be happening. She knew it in her gut. She had lasted there only a year, one year with four other girls in a tired old floor-through in Bushwick, with a creaky ceiling and neighbors who seemed to be constantly cooking. (Clanking pans, nonstop sizzles; why were they always frying something?) There were two windows in the apartment, one that faced an empty lot next door, and the other, which faced the trash-infested alleyway in the back. There were bars on the windows. Inside was prison, but outside was worse. Men made nasty comments to her on the street. She got called “white girl” a lot, and she hated it, even though she could not argue that point. She kept searching for the charm in her neighborhood but was neither equipped nor informed. She spent much of her time that year on a train to somewhere else in the city, anywhere else but there.

Her roommates were all the same as Robin, more or less. Their names were Jennifer and Julie and Jordan; they were all Jewish, they all had gone to midwestern colleges, and they had all individual secret joint bank accounts with their mothers, who would put a little extra in there every once in a while, so that they could treat themselves to something nice. There was a fifth roommate, who slept in the living room on the couch when she wasn’t sleeping at her girlfriend’s house. She was a brisk girl from Alaska, Teresa, who had grown up in a town of drunks, fighting her way to the middle class while the rest of the roommates did nothing but hover there.

They all had been brought together by the Teach for America program, and then spread out in terrible high schools across Brooklyn. Not quaint Park Slope Brooklyn, where the pretty people with babies lived, but east of there, on the way to racetracks and airports; on the way, it sometimes felt, to nowhere at all. Robin had not been prepared for any of it. Not even after a lifetime of consuming mass culture that told her how messed up schools in impoverished urban areas could be. Not a film or a song or an episode of Law & Order or a class in college or an orientation program had prepared her for how much one year teaching in a school full of at-risk kids was going to suck. If she was seeking hope and inspiration, or if she was thinking she was going to provide it, she was in the wrong place. She was way out of her league. Everyone knew it. She had no poker face. All day long she flinched.

She would wake up every morning and wonder if she was doing more harm than good. She spent money out of her own pocket on paper and markers. She tried to innovate: She covered a large empty tin can (last night’s diced tomatoes for the pasta sauce) with paper and named it the “Hear Me Can” and placed it in the front of the classroom. “When you feel like yelling or you’re upset about something, just write it down and put it in there,” she instructed the children. “And I promise you will be heard.”

After class, she would read the notes. Sometimes it was easy-to-take information.

Someone stole my pencil.

I don’t like tests.