Writers & Lovers(65)
I figure I won’t ever hear from them, but the next day I get a call from the head of the English department, Manolo Parker. He asks me to come in for an interview in three days, on the ninth of November, the day before my appointment with the oncologist.
Muriel lends me clothes, makeup, and her car for the interview. That morning I lie in bed feeling my lump. I can’t tell if it’s grown. The interview terrifies me nearly as much as the oncologist. I spend a half hour trying to fix my face, hide the deep gray-blue welts under my eyes with concealer, make my cheeks plump and rosy with blush, my eyes wider and more awake looking with an eye pencil. But my hands shake and the lines are crooked and there’s no disguising all the fear.
I allow time for rush hour, and I need it. Traffic crawls out of the city, light by light. Driving is a luxury I’ve forgotten. There’s heat, for one thing, and a radio. A guy is singing about taking his girlfriend to have an abortion. He calls her a brick that’s drowning him slowly. He says this over and over. I have a moment at a long light when I partially nod off, and when I jerk back awake I think for a few seconds I’m pregnant, and then I realize it’s not me, just the girl in the song, and it’s a relief. I get disproportionately sad for the girl whose asshole ex-boyfriend wrote this song calling her a brick and is making money on those words now. I pass through stone pillars and up a long, wooded drive and park in the faculty parking lot.
There’s a path from this lot up a steep hill to the school. Down below are fields marked out by white lines, goals at each end, and benches along the sides. It could be my high school. There’s a guy on a tractor mowing. It could be my father. I can’t work here. All the smells are the same.
The entrance is all glass, freshly renovated. Manolo meets me at the door.
His handshake is strong, not dialed back for a woman. He leads me down a glimmering hallway.
‘I thought you should see how we start the day,’ he says, holding open the auditorium door for a stream of students and their enormous backpacks. He greets them all by name. ‘Ciao, Stephen. You liking Sula any better today, Marika? Becca, Jep, top of the morning to you.’ They like him and his attentions. Becca points at me. ‘You interviewing today?’ I nod and she gives me a thumbs-up and keeps moving. Manolo leads me a few rows down, and we sit in plush fold-down seats with other teachers. He introduces me to the ones nearby, and a few others turn around and wave. They all seem to know why I’m here.
It’s loud. The whole school is here, seventh through twelfth Manolo tells me. He gives me a quick history of the school: founded by three local suffragettes, all girls until ’72, defunct from ’76 to ’78, rose from the ashes with the help of an anonymous donor whose only stipulation was that admission be need-blind.
The room quiets down. A gaunt woman with straight, gray hair to her shoulders has climbed up the steps to the stage and is standing at a podium in front of the closed curtain.
‘Head of school,’ Manolo whispers to me. ‘Aisha Jain.’
‘What I thought was love in me,’ she says, ‘I find a thousand instances as fear.’ She looks up and around and back down. ‘Of the tree’s shadow winding around the chair, a distant music of frozen birds rattling in the—’
A hand shoots up in the audience, and she stops, points to it. ‘David.’
‘Amiri Baraka, also known as LeRoi Jones. I can’t remember the title.’
‘Title, anyone?’
Another hand down in front. She nods. ‘Claire.’
‘The Liar.’
‘Good job, both of you. Bon appétit.’
‘They get a free treat at the snack bar for getting it right,’ Manolo tells me.
‘Enjoy your education today,’ she says and walks off the stage and takes a seat off to the side.
Students, lined up on the stairs, come onstage one by one to make announcements: photography field trip, green sneaker found on the roof (a large boy in back lumbers down the aisle to the base of the stage to retrieve it to much cheering), POC meeting after school here in the auditorium, Debate Club in 202, Gay-Straight Alliance in the library. When the announcements are over, the lights go down and the whole school starts screaming and stomping their feet as if we were at Fenway and the Sox had just put it over the wall. The curtain opens on two men with guitars, a woman on drums, and another woman with a sax at the mic.
‘Mama,’ she starts singing, low and slow, over the noise from the audience. It’s ‘Misguided Angel’ by the Cowboy Junkies. A song Paco and I danced to in his kitchen in Central Square.
Manolo leans over. ‘Math department band.’ There’s a makeshift piece of cardboard stuck on the front of the drum set that says: THE COSIGNS.
Next they play ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’ and end with ‘Try a Little Tenderness.’ They’re good. And they’re having a blast. The whole school rises in a standing O, and we filter out of the room.
Manolo has a huge smile on his face. Everyone does, including me.
‘Wow,’ I say. ‘What a way to start the day.’
We’re walking more slowly than the rest, who are rushing past us to class.
‘Aisha told me once that the number-one quality she looks for in a candidate when hiring is happiness. I thought it was cheesy when I first heard it, but you can tell. This is a pretty happy place.’