Writers & Lovers(74)
Of all his strange responses, this is the one that helps me the most. This is not nothing.
Manolo calls and offers me the job. Two sections of ninth grade, two sections of juniors, and a creative writing elective starting next semester. Full-time salary, Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance. No more Pilgrims.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What don’t you understand?’
‘The interview with Aisha didn’t go well.’
He laughs. ‘Trust me. It went very well. She wouldn’t hear of anyone else after you came in.’
He asks me to come in that afternoon to fill out some paperwork and pick up the books I’ll be teaching, the school handbook, and the English department curriculum. He asks if I can start the next Monday.
‘Also, I don’t know if you saw the posters but we’re hosting a writing festival in two weeks. Would you be willing to make some introductory remarks? You’re the one in the department who can speak to a real commitment to the writing life. Aisha liked whatever it was you said about that.’
What had I said about that?
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I can say something.’
There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose. I feel all that as I hold the phone and listen to Manolo talk about W-4s and the study hall schedule and my mailbox combination and faculty parking. For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.
I have a week to finish the revision for Jennifer and prep for my classes.
I get out my manuscript and start reading. I take notes. A few things she said come back, but when I push to remember more, I can’t. I start the rewrite anyway. I look up and it’s dark. I look up again and it’s past midnight.
I work like that for five days and nights. I eat spaghetti with red sauce and apples with peanut butter. I don’t even go out for a run. When people skulk around my window with the realtor I pull down the shade. I luxuriate in the time, the endless time. No doubles, no shifts at all. The Iris smell is gone permanently from my hair. My body still zings. But it isn’t all bad zinging. Some of it is good energy. Some of it is a strange excitement.
On Friday afternoon I stand in line at the post office.
‘Still at it,’ she says, punching in the numbers.
‘Yup.’
‘Well, can’t shoot you for trying.’
Over the weekend I reread Siddhartha and Their Eyes Were Watching God and make lesson plans. Muriel and I go to a consignment shop in Davis Square. If I had gone alone I would have found nothing, but she sets me up in a dressing room and brings me treasures: a gray cashmere sweater with buttons down the back, a knee-length suede skirt, black boots with a bright red zipper.
On Monday morning I wake up at five. I need to establish a routine right from the start: an hour and a half of writing every day before work. I sit at my desk and collect my notes—on dupes from Iris, in the backs of a few books, in a small pad I keep in my knapsack—about an idea I have for something new. At the back of a new notebook I make a rough timeline of what I have so far. I turn to the front of the notebook. I already know the first line.
My first class is juniors. They come in and slough off their heavy backpacks with a thud. I try to say hi to each one as they come in, as if it is normal for me to be teaching a high school class. I haven’t been around this age since I was this age. Just looking at their faces—the zitty one, the shiny one, the worried one, the pissed-off one—makes me grateful I’m not back there still. Before they came in, I was nervous, but now that I see them I just want to help them get through the day. I learn their names quickly—it’s a lot easier than memorizing apps and entrées for a six-top—and ask them to catch me up on their semester so far, what they liked and what they didn’t. I realize I’m sitting up on the left corner of the desk just like Mr. Tuck used to, and even though I’m still mad at him, I’m channeling him right now.
They’re halfway through Their Eyes Were Watching God, but I go back closer to the beginning and read them several pages out loud and end on the part about Nanny on her knees in the shack, praying about her mistakes. Afterward I ask them to write about a time they felt like that. They open their notebooks slowly. They’re wary, like when you try to feed a squirrel.
I call Muriel from my office on my free period. I spin in my chair and tell her about the beautiful paragraph a junior named Evelyn wrote about her little sister being born and all the compliments I’d gotten on the boots. Two teachers walk by talking about the New Deal. It’s lasagna for lunch and the smell travels the hallways.
After we hang up I feel good enough to imagine calling Silas at Trevor Hills where he works—I imagine him on break, too, in his office—but my heartbeat picks up and I need to be calm for my next class.
High school classes are short and fly by. I never get through half my lesson plan. After months of talking about lamb shank and lemon rind reductions, it’s a relief to talk about books.
At the end of each day that week I remember my own novel but with more curiosity and less panic. I wonder if Jennifer is reading it. I decide not to worry about not hearing from her until next month.
But she is on my machine when I get home from school Thursday afternoon. It’s a brief message, and she is talking very quickly. I have to play it a few times. The revision did the trick, she says. She’s going out with it.