Eye to Eye (3 page)

Who in the
world
would have thought that I'd find myself sometimes longing for the relatively simpler life of Indiana? Sitting out on Earl's porch, listening to him tell stories about growing up in a small town, or watching a free movie in the park at night while fireflies drifted past, or—and this is really scary—longing for the days when I sat in a graduate seminar of self-important academics in training, throwing around Foucault and bell hooks with shaky authority. But I'm confronting my longing. I admit my longing: I've complained to Earl since moving back. Okay. I've ranted, monologued, delivered hour-long dissertations. In typical Earl fashion, he's not phased one bit. He's on easy street, relaxed and loving his adventure in L.A., the traffic, the smog, all of it. Earl responds to it with a shrug, a shake of his head and a grin. Meanwhile, this Ian kid has nearly sent me to my first visit to a therapist in all my thirty years of living.

Hearing that Toni Morrison's
The Bluest Eye
is “lame” and school is “retarded” and he is “going to be a music producer, so who needed this shit anyway?” makes me panic about the purpose of trying to teach anyone anything. He hadn't even tried to read the book. After that first meeting with Ian, I went home to Earl, and I was still stunned. He pulled me up from the couch and gave me one of his bear hugs. “It is what it is, darlin'. You're home. You're an L.A. woman.”

“It's not the same,” I said mournfully into Earl's T-shirt. “And if it's not rich Hollywood kids driving me to drink, it's all these other fools running around who are not even
from
here. People pose so hard, it's a wonder they don't break a goddamn bone.”

Earl grinned at me. “I ain't from here. You like me all right. And anyhow, it ain't who's from where, it's who sees eye to eye,” he said. “You can't blame folks for trying to get somewhere. They're just trying too hard, is all. Getting above their raising is what Daddy used to say.”

“Being a pain in the ass is what my daddy calls it.”

“Actually,” Earl said, giving me another squeeze, “my daddy calls it that, too.” Then he winked, let me go and ran his hands through his newly short hair with the neat, sandy waves that looked slightly retro, and I made up my mind to stop whining, to count my blessings. I was living in the place I was born, raised, and wanted to be with a good person, a smart person, a handsome man. Someone who understood me. Cain't beat that with a stick, Earl would say.

I kissed his freshly shaved right cheek, right on his dimple, and said, “Thanks, Erardo, baby. Thanks for being so sane.”

Earl tugged on one of my braids. “Erardo. I still ain't used to you calling me that.”

“Viva Italia!”
I shouted.

He shook his head. “I wish you never knew I was Italian. Hell, I don't even think of myself thataway.”

The only reason I knew that Earl's real name was Erardo Lo Vecchio was because it showed up on my caller ID the first time he called me. I've continued to get a kick out of his name since then, and for a long time I was obsessed with Italy and Italians, anything that was a combination thereof. I've calmed my Italian lust, although Doris would say that's arguable. She would also say that my lust for Earl had nothing to do with his Italian pheromones wafting toward me. She would say that in spite of my hard head, I was seeing him for the true man he was, the true man he is—a reluctant Italian who's much more Billy Ray than Bruno, who's crazy about me and gets what I'm saying, even though we were raised on two different planets. Planet Indiana and Planet California.

 

Earl keeps giving me Diet Cokes and now that it's later in the evening, nine o'clock, things are picking up. I watch him banter and carry on with Katie, who I try to like, but she's way too flirty with Earl for me to give her a break. I didn't think I was the jealous kind. But now, I watch her closely. If you looked up the antonyms for
willowy
and
blond,
in both cases the thesaurus would say my name. Veronica Williams. Curvy and dark. All night, Katie's been chatting it up with Earl, laughing and lightly touching him to guide him out of her way as she moves fast around the tight space, taking orders and pouring drinks. She and her cleavage are working hard to charm the customers. But maybe I should see that she's working hard. She makes her job seem easy and breezy, but she's a bit too hyper about it.

Earl told me she wants to be (surprise!) an actor. “An
actor,
” I said. “Figures.”

“I thought ladies was called ‘actresses'?” Earl questioned at the time.

“Do you go to doctresses?” I asked him. “Or get tickets by police officeresses?” That whole diminutive tag for jobs that happened to be done by women always killed me.

“Got it,” Earl said.

The busier it gets, the more I think it's time for me to walk back up the hill because I never want to be out on the street too late at night. I've not been gone from L.A. so long that I forget the dark streets can be full of creepy motherfuckers who think it's cute to chop up women. Besides, Earl's getting too busy to keep me company while Katie's working overtime to keep him company. For a moment, the images of them together get to me and I have a fleeting thought that the two of them
look
like they should be together, but I shake it off. I try to get his attention while The Beastie Boys fade out on the jukebox. When Ray Charles kicks in, Earl perks up. He's nodding his head to the music and I can see him whistling, even if I can't hear him over the orchestration.

“Earl!” Katie hollers. “Sing it. You know you can sing. Don't be shy!”

Earl puts a drink on the counter and looks around the bar, searching for me. I'm down at one end, so cup my hands around my mouth and shout, “Sing, baby!” I love to hear him sing. It's just busy enough, but not too busy that folks can't hear Earl sing if he really belts it out. He shrugs, holds his towel out, as if to say,
should I?
I nod, blow him a kiss, point to my wrist watch, and thumb toward the bar exit.

Earl grins, mouths
I love you,
and waits for the next verse before he joins Ray.

His voice is strong and deep over the din of the bar. He waves goodbye, but sings at me, so I can't leave. All the folks whistle at Earl and egg him on. I'm mesmerized, and I'm thinking if Katie sees what I see, if everybody sees what I see, Earl's going to fit right in, in the land of looking good.

When I turn to leave, I catch something out the corner of my eye. It's Katie. This time, when she touches Earl to move around him at the bar, she stands behind him, gives him a squeeze from behind and rests her face against his back. I get a feeling, a sick feeling. It surprises me, this feeling, and it takes me a little while to recognize that it's fear. But I don't even know what I'm afraid of, exactly.

(* For those unfamiliar with academic lingo, “practicing postmodernist and dater of borderline fascists” means that although I have a liberal job in a liberal profession, I subscribe to
Us Weekly
and date the occasional republican, à la Maria Shriver.)

 

Okay, before everyone runs screaming at the somewhat pretentious comparison of my life to Ezra Pound's, let me tell you why I think an old-school poet like Pound is an appropriate model for a woman like me, why “d,” dear readers, is the correct answer to today's multiple-choice pop quiz. As poetic mandates go, what could be more appropriate than “Make it New,” especially when being a professor-professional poet requires that you uproot your life, choose between your job and your boyfriend and start brand-new in a brand-new city at the less-than-tender age of thirty-two?

Pound believed in the power of image, so let me start by giving a few from the past three weeks of my life. First, August 10, me, packing up the shards of sanity that still remain from seven years of graduate school in Langsdale, Indiana, where I recently completed my Ph.D. in poetry writing. It's almost as useful in real-world terms as devoting one's life to the study of foam patterns at the top of cappuccinos versus lattes. I use this metaphor largely because failed Ph.D.s in poetry often find themselves intimately reacquainted with the making of coffee—although I must say that my sisters at Starbucks might have a benefits package to rival that of my new employer, Atlanta State University. Into my trunk went the spoils of years spent shopping cleverly at flea markets for the perfect blend of kitsch and acceptable adult decoration. My signed Marilyn Monroe framed picture from a yard sale in Terre Haute, although it may have only been signed by the three-year-old running around in a saggy pair of underwear and “Got Milk” T-shirt; a formica coffee table set with red chairs and slightly rusted aluminum legs (and fifties styling to rival June Cleaver's, might I add), and more, all loaded up in Indiana, and unloaded in Atlanta, Georgia, into my swanky midtown loft where I stare at them and wonder if I am actually a nouveau Beverly-hillbilly. Can I make this work? Can the old me become new again?

Image number two, this from only a couple of days ago: August 27, on the cusp of the first day of class and me, lost and frustrated on the streets of Atlanta. I had been trying to find the newly opened Ikea, and wound up somehow driving twenty miles past it to Marietta, where I encountered a giant mechanical chicken the size of a three-story building—the “big chicken” of “you are officially outside the Atlanta city limits” fame. Knowing I was lost, I pulled into the parking lot of the Army-Navy surplus store, only to be greeted by a row of “Yankee, go home” bumper stickers, which I couldn't help but take personally—and at the same time, I felt like gesturing at them and saying I WISH I COULD EVEN FIND MY STUPID HOME. A perfectly nice gentleman behind a counter of death stars gave me polite directions back into the city, and I tried hard not to sound like the displaced New Yorker that I am.

The euphoria of the initial move had worn thin, and all of my excitement at having found a job was slowly being replaced by the thought that making new friends in one's thirties was not as easy as doing so in one's twenties. My next-door neighbor, a funky singleton of about my age, had mentioned drinks, but hadn't followed through yet. I had gone to three coffee shops before I realized that one couldn't simply sit at a coffee shop and expect to make friends—that smiling at strangers merely made one look deranged, not friendly. Ditto for the same behavior at power-yoga, my other attempt to be social. Although there were some nice-looking men, particularly one bald, black man who could have been Michael Jordan's twin, whose downward dog was a thing to behold—but I digress. That, plus I am separated by the entire contiguous United States from my best friend of the past half-decade, and I am not one of those writers who enjoys ongoing solitude. Solitude makes me cut weird bangs, overpluck my eyebrows and eat too many Nutter Butters.

Driving back from the outer edges of the city, the only thing that kept me from weeping in frustration at the glacial pace of traffic was the knowledge that Zach, my boyfriend of three years, was arriving in seventy-two hours to help transition me into my new life. So when I finally re-entered my apartment, the one spot of familiarity and comfort in Atlanta, I had moved past relief to gratefulness at the sight of Zach's number on my caller ID. Zach, calling to tell me that “things had come up,” and he wasn't going to be able to drive from Langsdale, Indiana, to Atlanta, Georgia. “We'll talk later in the week,” he said. “I can tell you're tired, and I don't want to upset you more.”

Image number three: this, today, August 29, the day before my debut at Atlanta state as Dr. Doris Weatherall. The “money shot” of the entire move was my entering the building that houses the English department to start a job where I am no longer grad-school-wastrel and Oprah-watcher Doris Weatherall, but fully bona fide assistant professor, Dr. Doris Weatherall, with attendant adult salary and health plan. In honor of my confirmed adulthood, I am wearing a Katherine Hepburn–worthy ensemble of grey tailored pants, white shirt and Pradalike naughty-conservative lace-up shoes with decidedly nonsensible heel. I moved up from Miss Clairol to the Aveda salon, and my hair is dyed a rich red-brown and cut in long layers that reach about an inch below my shoulder.

I feel glamorous and professional.

For about five minutes.

The glamour wears off after I drop my books in my office and go back down the hall to my mailbox. On top of the various catalogs and beginning-of-school calendars sits a letter, with DORIS W. scrawled in serial-killer-like spidery writing across the front of the envelope. I open the envelope to see what looks like a hand-stamped logo of CLASSROOM in gigantic capital letters, with the middle of the letters slightly hollowed out to fit the word
politics
in small letters. Circled around the writing is a thick, red line with a slash through it, similar to the implied “no” in “no smoking” signs. Even creepier, below it, in the same handwriting are the words, “We are watching you. Watch yourself!”

From behind me, I hear, “That's what they didn't tell you about during your campus visit.” A thin blonde whom I vaguely remember from my interview last winter as Dr. Asa Davies takes the sheet of paper from my hand and traces her finger around the red circle. “No politics in the classroom—get it? And be warned, they have moles in all the classrooms. They actually tried to sue me last year, but it got thrown out of the kangaroo campus court. I teach postcolonial lit. Try keeping politics out of that. I suppose I should change my reading of
Robinson Crusoe
to explain how Friday found his true calling and learned his place in the brave, new, Eurocentric world. Welcome to Atlanta State University, where the inmates have a hand in running the asylum. Like I said, things they never tell you about on your campus visits.”

She shrugs her shoulders, and then, like some academic oracle, she turns and disappears down the hall.

I fold the paper in half and put it in my new tote bag, a gift from Zach when I first secured this job. Before taking any job, candidates go on “campus visits,” where they are put through a rigorous round of interviews, job talks, and given a chance to see what the campus is like for themselves. And while helpful, campus visits are sort of like first dates. Unless the school is beyond help, they put on their best face and pitch as much woo as an underfunded state university can. I knew that the student body was conservative as a whole, and I knew that there had been some stirrings in the Georgia legislature as to what should be taught in the classrooms. This is a state, after all, where they put stickers on high school science books, saying “evolution is a theory”—which, I assume is also
inside
the textbooks, as “theory” is scientific for “all but written in stone truth.” I figured that as a poet I could fly under the radar, but it would appear that I had figured wrong.

 

I return to my office, a concrete block with cell-like rectangular windows ringing the top—enough windows to let light in, but not enough to see the goings-on of the world outside. Atlanta State University is located on the northwest side of Atlanta in a block of buildings that could only be converted housing projects. I was shocked when I first saw my “office,” a cubicle that might just as easily have been used to interrogate prisoners in some
Escape from Atlanta
–style Kurt Russell TNT late-night urban guerilla warfare movie. It's no ivory tower—it's not even any Langsdale University, for that matter, which, while rural and threatening to unleash the children of the corn, was truly beautiful.

The address for the university is deceptive. When I was mailing out applications, twenty-eight in all, to every job for which I was qualified within a thirty-mile radius of a large metropolitan area, Atlanta State University on Peachtree Grove Avenue sounded idyllic. I had images of a hip-but-lush campus, cordoned off from the city, with actual peach trees from which I might nab a late-afternoon snack. Never mind that I'd never seen a peach tree. Never mind that I now know that calling anything “Peachtree” in Atlanta is somewhat akin to naming a baby boy Mohammed in the Muslim world, or calling helpless newborns “Apple” or “Roman.” No peach trees bloom on Atlanta State University's campus. In fact, only a smattering of sad, straggly saplings all but grope for light between evenly-spaced gaps of pavement lining the streets nearby. But in the academic job market, a job is a job, and by the time they offered me a position, teaching poetry no less, it was yes-I-said-yes-I-will-yes. Yes.

My office is newly painted, a periwinkle-blue that I hope will make me creative and productive. Half-unpacked boxes of books have all been shoved against the walls, cramping me into the middle of the room. I've been provided with a computer and a phone, three chairs and a minirefrigerator that looks as if it was thrown away from a dorm in the midsixties. I lean back in one of the chairs and prop my feet on the refrigerator, looking again at the “We are watching you. Watch yourself.” Not exactly words to warm one's heart.

What the neo-Nazis are about to find out, however, is that I, Doris Weatherall—
Dr.
Doris Weatherall—am nothing if not a contrarian. When all the world is wearing platform heels, I schlep around in ballet flats. When the “natural look” demands a clear and overglossed lip, I slather on the 1950s movie-star reds, vamping my pout to the absolute max. And when some bossy campus fascists tell me not to talk about politics in my classroom, I redesign my opening speech to address the topic directly.

This semester I am teaching “Introduction to American Literature,” “Beginning Poetry Writing,” and the upper-level seminar on “World Literature.” But the first class of the day tomorrow is American lit—perfect venue for discussing the nature of politics in the classroom. I lock my door and open a copy of Ben Franklin's autobiography, looking for a way to tie the week's first reading with my rant about free speech and a liberal arts education. My computer chimes gently in the background, letting me know that Ronnie is awake and online. I open my IM screen.