My Last Innocent Year(13)
“So,” Professor Connelly said, looking around the room. Everyone was waiting, their pens poised above their notebooks, unsure what, if anything, we should be writing down. “What can I teach you? I can teach you to be honest, to tell the truth, to look at the things you’re afraid to see. To not be afraid of what your friends will think or what your parents will think, to peel away the bullshit and see things for what they are. To find moral clarity in your work and in your life.”
Whitney poked me with her pen. In the margin of her notebook, she’d written “Hot for Teacher???” in big letters. I scribbled over it, felt my face get hot. I had noticed as Professor Connelly was speaking that he was handsome, very handsome. He might in fact have been the most handsome man I’d ever seen at Wilder, maybe anywhere. There was a whiff of scandal about him, although maybe I filled in that part later. When I was older, I would find men like him too handsome for their own good, striding into bars and conference rooms like mortal gods. But back then, I still believed beauty conferred a kind of moral superiority and so, as I watched him walk over to the window, traced the line of his shirt with my eyes to where it disappeared down the back of his pants, I would have followed him anywhere.
“Let’s begin,” he said, and so we did.
“I want you to write about something you’ve lost. It can be anything—an object, a person, an illusion. Your virginity.” Ramona Diaz, the only junior in the class, laughed a short, nervous laugh. Whitney raised her hand, but Professor Connelly ignored her. “Now close your eyes and picture it.” I looked around the room. Only Ginny McDougall had her eyes closed, but she might have been asleep.
“Come on. Close them.” I waited until everyone had closed their eyes, then closed mine. “Write about the first thing that comes to mind, the thing that scares you, the thing you don’t want to write about. The thing you don’t want your mother to know about, or your best friend. Or your lover.” I could hear him walking around the table, the soft slap of his boots, the jingle of something in his pocket. “What’s it like to lose something you can never get back? What does your life look like—what does it feel like—without it? Maybe you’ve grown used to its absence. Maybe you haven’t.” He stopped behind me and rested his hands on the back of my chair; if I leaned back, my shoulder blades would have touched his fingers. “Whatever it is, start writing. Keep your pen moving no matter what. You’ll think it’s shit, and a lot of it will be. But I’m here to tell you, it isn’t all shit.” I could hear him breathing, could smell him. Woodsmoke and peppermint. I held my breath, felt it swell in my chest until I couldn’t hold it anymore. Professor Connelly whispered, “Now go.”
The first thing that came to my mind was Binky Ballard—lost to his family and friends, lost to time, to the world—and so I wrote about Binky, imagining the life he’d had at Wilder and beyond. I kept my pen moving, as Professor Connelly had instructed, and before I knew it Binky and the family he’d left behind dissolved into a story about my mother, shuffling around our kitchen in her cornflower-blue bathrobe, boiling coffee on the stove in a silver espresso pot someone had brought her from Italy, one of many places she had never been and would never go. I wrote about my mother, Vivian, sitting at the kitchen table, turning the pages of the New York Times, half listening as I told her about my day, thinking instead about the painting she was working on, the one she would turn her attention to as soon as I left, the painting I would run home to see at the end of the day. Everything fell away and I was back in that kitchen overlooking the alleyway, alone with my mother, a corkscrew curl brushing her cheek as she cradled her coffee cup in her hands. I could hear her breathing, the quick rasp on the inhale, coffee breath on the exhale, the smell of paint thinner and perfume so strong I was sure Whitney could smell it. “My mother will never be an old woman,” I wrote once, twice, three times in a row. I mouthed the words silently and felt weak.
I closed my eyes, dizzy with remembering, but my pen kept moving, as if it were no longer connected to my hand. The memory shifted again, and I was back in our kitchen the night she died, coffeepot still on the stove, bathrobe hanging behind the bathroom door. Everything there but her. There was a knock on the door. It was the man from the crematorium holding a pair of her earrings. The hospital had forgotten to remove them, he said, and he’d come from Brooklyn to bring them to us. “I thought the girl might want them,” he said to Abe, with a pitying glance my way. Abe thanked him, too effusively I thought. When he was gone, Abe dropped the earrings on the table and poured himself a drink, then poured one for me. In the morning, the earrings were still there, some cheap shitty pair like every cheap shitty thing in our apartment. Like her cheap shitty life. I picked up the earrings and tossed them out the window. They landed in the alleyway behind our building where, as far as I knew, they were still.
“Stop writing.” Professor Connelly was back in his seat. I had no idea how much time had passed. My palm was wet; I had sweat through my bra. I’d written almost eight pages in my notebook. Across from me, Holly Crane and Alec Collier, who looked like brother and sister and went everywhere holding hands, were each giggling at what the other had written. Linus Harrison, who told anyone who would listen that his grandfather invented the paper shredder, was copying the details of the syllabus into his PalmPilot. Only Andy was still writing; from where I was sitting, I could see he had barely a page.