My Dark Vanessa(7)
When I get to American lit, the last class of the day, the first thing I notice is that Mr. Strane has changed his shirt since the convocation speech. He stands at the front of the room leaning against a chalkboard, arms folded over his chest, looking even bigger than he appeared onstage. There are ten of us in the class, including Jenny and Tom, and as we enter the room Mr. Strane’s eyes follow us, like he’s sizing us up. When Jenny comes in, I’m already sitting at the seminar table a couple seats away from Tom. His face lights up at the sight of her, and he motions for her to sit in the empty chair between us—he’s oblivious, doesn’t understand why that is absolutely out of the question. Gripping her backpack straps, Jenny gives him a terse smile.
“Let’s sit on this side instead,” she says, meaning the opposite side, meaning away from me. “It’s better over here.”
Her eyes skim past me the way they did at the dorm meeting. In a way it seems silly, putting all this effort into pretending an entire friendship never existed.
When the bell rings to signal the start of class, Mr. Strane doesn’t move. He waits for us to fall into silence before speaking. “I assume you all know each other,” he says, “but I don’t think I know all of you.”
He moves to the head of the seminar table and calls on us at random, asking our names and where we’re from. Some of us he asks other questions—do we have any siblings; where’s the farthest we’ve ever traveled; if we could choose a new name for ourselves, what would it be? He asks Jenny at what age she first fell in love and a blush takes over her whole face. Beside her, Tom turns red, too.
When it’s my turn to introduce myself, I say, “My name’s Vanessa Wye and I’m not really from anywhere.”
Mr. Strane sits back in his chair. “Vanessa Wye, not really from anywhere.”
I laugh out of nerves, from hearing how stupid my words sound when repeated back to me. “I mean, it’s a place but not really a town. It doesn’t have a name. They just call it Township Twenty-Nine.”
“Here in Maine? Out on that down east highway?” he asks. “I know exactly where that is. There’s a lake out that way that has a lovely name, Whale-something.”
I blink in surprise. “Whalesback Lake. We live right on it. We’re the only year-round house.” As I speak, an odd pang hits my heart. I hardly ever feel homesick at Browick, but maybe that’s because no one ever knows where I’m from.
“No kidding.” Mr. Strane thinks for a moment. “Do you get lonely out there?”
For a moment, I’m dumbstruck. The question slices a painless cut, shockingly clean. Even though lonely isn’t a word I’d ever used to describe how it feels living out there deep in the woods, hearing Mr. Strane say it now makes me think it must be true, probably has always been true, and suddenly I’m embarrassed, imagining that loneliness plastered all over my face, obvious enough that a teacher needs only one look to know I’m a lonely person. I manage to say, “I guess sometimes,” but Mr. Strane has already moved on, asking Greg Akers what it was like to move from Chicago to the foothills of western Maine.
Once we all introduce ourselves, Mr. Strane says his class will be the hardest we take this year. “Most students tell me I’m the toughest teacher at Browick,” he says. “I’ve had some say I’m tougher than their college professors.” He drums his fingers against the table and lets the gravity of this information settle onto us. Then he walks to the chalkboard, grabs a piece of chalk, and begins to write. Over his shoulder, he says, “You should already be taking notes.”
We scramble for our notebooks as he launches into a lecture about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the poem “The Song of Hiawatha,” which I’ve never heard of, and I can’t be the only one, but when he asks the class if we’re familiar with it, we all nod. No one wants to look stupid.
While he lectures, I sneak glances around the room. The bones of it are the same as all the others in the humanities building—hardwood floors, a wall of built-in bookcases, green chalkboards, a seminar table—but his classroom feels lived-in and comfortable. There’s a rug with a worn path down its center, a big oak desk lit by a green banker’s lamp, a coffeemaker and a mug with the Harvard seal sitting atop a filing cabinet. The smell of cut grass and the sound of a car engine starting drift in through the open window, and at the chalkboard Mr. Strane writes a line from Longfellow with such intensity the chalk crumbles in his hand. At one point, he stops, turns to us, and says, “If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.” I do my best to copy down everything he says word for word.
With five minutes left of class, the lecture suddenly stops. Mr. Strane’s hands drop to his sides, his shoulders slump. Abandoning the chalkboard, he sits at the seminar table, rubs his face, and heaves a sigh. Then in a weary voice he says, “The first day is always so long.”
Around the table, we wait, unsure what to do, our pens hovering above our notebooks.
He drops his hands from his face. “I’ll be honest with you all,” he says. “I’m fucking tired.”
Across the table, Jenny laughs in surprise. Sometimes teachers joke around in class, but I’ve never heard one say “fuck.” It never occurred to me that a teacher could.