Professor X (9 page)

Rose goes on at great length about the lots of other ways I could have achieved my educational goals. Remediation is what he wants me to do, but he seems to forget that I do not teach remedial or developmental classes, and cannot transform my bona fide honest-to-God fully accredited college class into one. The truth, of course, without any sugarcoating, is that the work submitted by my students is often so garbled that it is impossible to understand what they are thinking.

I read the compare-contrast essays that the students had written. I knew that we would have to start at the beginning.
A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought.
I wanted to go back there. I felt the tug of the past. I wanted to start at the very beginning and replicate the nineteen years of language arts study. I couldn't, of course, so I compromised. We would start not at the roots of language or usage but the roots of thought.

I read one essay aloud.

“Here we have a piece delineating the differences between cats and dogs,” I said. “ ‘Dogs are friendly, cats are not. Dogs greet their owners at the end of the day; cats do not. Dogs appear grateful for everything they get in life; cats do not.' Now, what's the problem with this essay?”

“It's not true?” said one student uncertainly.

“Why isn't it true?”

“You can't just say all cats are a certain way. You may have had a friendly cat.”

I smiled to myself. She was young, not too long out of high school.
You can't just say.
Are there any words more chilling to a writer? The high school teachers had schooled her in a curriculum of political correctness. She knew that she shouldn't demean cats by stereotyping them. She was a nice young woman, I'm sure, and she'd never say a mean or unfair word about any living thing, particularly in a classroom setting.

“I actually think what the essay says is true,” I said. “I've never known a friendly cat. No, the ideas behind the piece are, in some senses, valid. But in my mind the essay is not completely satisfying. Why is that?”

I got several half hearted and confused answers.

I was starting to get a little ticked at the students, I must admit. It seemed I was working a lot harder than they were.

“Think of it this way,” I said. “You're at a party. And there's a beautiful person on the other side of the room—a person that you really, really want to get to know before the night is out. You sidle up to him or her. You introduce yourself. The person reciprocates. There is electricity. You feel a bit of magic. Your heart flutters. You really need something great to tell this person. You need the start of a conversation. You desperately require some witty repartee. And so you lean over to the person and, with all the suavity you can muster, you say, ‘You know, dogs and cats are really different. Dogs are friendly. Cats are not.' ”

The class laughed. The writer of the essay, whom I had not identified, laughed as well. He reddened rather dramatically.

“So what's the problem?” I asked.

The laughter cut off. Confusion and uncertainty.

“What's the problem?” I cried. “You're all laughing. What's so funny?”

My nice young friend who was on the side of cats answered again. I think she wanted to redeem herself. “You would never say that at a party.”

“Why not?”

“It's kind of . . . obvious.”

Hallelujah. Now we were getting somewhere.

“So why would it be good enough for this assignment?” I asked. “The writer must seduce the reader, just like you want to seduce someone at a party. I, as a reader, have a lot of other stuff I could be doing. Why should I read anything? I could be watching a movie or eating a good dinner or surfing the Internet. Why the hell would I want to read about dogs and cats?”

They understood, the class. They got it. They knew that what had been written was absurd, but it was just an assignment, with no relevance to the real world. For the indifferent student, all work is busy work, empty effort to occupy time and, hopefully, garner some credit in the end.

“I think you all just may have to think harder and work better,” I said.

By semester's end, I believe the class had made some small progress, but in truth it's hard to say. They were a challenge, and I was brand new. Certain assignments they made a complete hash of, and I, because of my inexperience, couldn't help them even a lick. Their research papers, for example, were utter disasters, because I didn't realize at how low a level they were operating; to dip into educational-speak, I didn't know how fragmented and disjointed their schematas were. When I explained to them how to develop a thesis and how to use passages from scholarly articles in journals to buttress that thesis, I didn't realize that I was speaking a completely foreign language: they had never seen, had never touched, had never even heard alluded to, this mysterious entity called a scholarly journal.

As a new instructor, I regretted my incompetence. That semester, I failed only the hardest cases, those students who stopped handing in assignments or even coming to class. Some of the nursing students and the middle-aged moms, who tended to hand in papers twice the required length, finished with low B's, which was already a compromise, as in my heart none of them did true B work. I gave one A. Everyone else swam in the polluted waters of C and C-minus and D.

My administrative systems were not yet locked in place. I had given some students the benefit of the doubt. Some students claimed to have handed in assignments of which I had no record; I had to assume the mistakes were my fault. I was still a naïf. I did not yet realize that some students, behind their earnest masks of good effort, were coldly, ruthlessly—like any high school punk, like smarmy Eddie Haskell—playing me for a sucker. I looked at that marvelous college-Gothic architecture, the arches, the trefoil windows, the spires pointing to heaven, and I was still thinking of college as a place of elevated virtue—of nobility.

My eye for grades was not yet sure. Some of those C's and C-minuses should have been D's; some high C's could have crept up to very, very, very low B's. But none of the students seemed to notice. I submitted the grades and never heard another word about any of it.
I can do this
, I thought rather merrily.
Not too bad.
I was happy to have gotten through it unscathed. We were in a college classroom, though we were often not doing college work. A visitor coming upon my class, in that stone fortress of an arts and humanities building, might think that we were enacting some sort of college idyll. We could, if the visitor squinted a bit, be at Harvard. But make no mistake: beneath the surface of that serene and scholarly mise en-scène roiled waters of frustration and bad feeling. I was teaching students who were in over their heads.

E
VERY SEMESTER, in English 102, Introduction to College Literature, we read “The Dead.” I think about the genteel poverty of the Morkan sisters and their niece. I think of their real estate choices. Yes, they were only renting the dark gaunt house, but there were many small luxuries in their lives. They were happy. They lived on a small scale.

How on Earth did I get where I am?

Here is my story in real estate. It adheres to the classic four phase form of the short story, the form I teach the students: exposition, rising action, climax, denouement.

 

Exposition.
I grew up in a placid residential neighborhood on the edge of the city, a place of great spreading shade trees and above-ground pools and ice cream trucks with bells that tinkled gently. My upbringing could be called suburban in some ways, even though I lived in the city and the bite of the city was always faintly present: in the candy stores with wooden telephone booths in the back, where all manner of shady business was conducted; in the teenaged gangs who prowled the streets and hung out in the parks; in the boxes of untaxed cigarettes stored in the garages of neighbors working for organized crime. The itinerant scissors grinder—he worked off a horsedrawn cart, of all things, and this in 1965!—was known to be a numbers runner, even by us children, who had only the dimmest notion of what numbers running was. When the sun shone brightly, the quartz and mica in the sidewalks glittered, the ladies who ran the fêtes at the Lutheran church poured glasses of blue Kool-Aid, and the sound I remember most was the buzzing and clicking of bicycle gears.

My friends' parents owned their houses. Mostly, the houses were little attached boxes of brick, here and there a small ranch. My most affluent friend lived in a Queen Anne with a wraparound porch and forest-green shutters and a flagpole in front. His father, with great ceremony, raised and lowered the flag every evening at dusk. My family rented. We lived on the second floor of a two-family house above our landlords, a middle-aged Italian-American couple, John and Angie Vigilante, and Angie's mother, Mrs. LoGerfo. Toothy Mrs. LoGerfo was bedridden. She was dying, I was told as a child, though she seemed cheerful enough, in her toothy old-lady way, when I caught glimpses of her. She was dying, as it turned out, but only in the way we all are dying, as she lived for another dozen years.

My life inside that apartment was proscribed. There were lots of things I couldn't do. The Vigilantes took great pains that Mrs. LoGerfo be comfortable, and while that was a pain in the neck for me, I had to respect how protective they were of her. I couldn't play in the alley because that would disturb Mrs. LoGerfo. I couldn't throw a rubber ball against the garage door because it wasn't our garage door. And it would disturb Mrs. LoGerfo. So there would also be no basketball hoop on the garage. I couldn't blare the TV. I couldn't jump in the living room because that might dislodge their ornate chandelier. I couldn't use the side door because I might disturb the Vigilantes' nephew, Jimmy, a weedy young man who looked, in his dark suits and rimless eyeglasses, like a seminarian. Jimmy was getting his Ph.D., it was said. He lived in the basement, but I never figured out where. His existence seemed Anne Frank-like. I was afraid of the basement, and avoided it, but sometimes when I took out the garbage, I risked a peek down there, and I saw no place habitable. This wasn't a basement but a cellar: stacks of boxes, a pyramid of loose pipes, mops and brooms, an old free-standing bird cage, peach baskets, cinderblock walls, and a slop sink. Sometimes I thought he slept in the coal bin; I always expected to see him sitting on the pipes, hunched over his dissertation. But I never did. In truth I forgot for years at a time that he lived down there, but then he would reappear, coming out the side door with his grad student satchel, and I'd feel weird and jumpy, as though I was being watched, all the rest of the day.

That my family was one of the few in the neighborhood who didn't own a home didn't really bother me. I seldom thought about it. My friends mentioned it only once. A kid named Tommy asked me about it one day, and we settled the matter rather quickly. I had just come outside. He looked up at the apartment windows and, with a cross expression, placed his hands on his hips.

“Why don't you get your own house?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I think we might soon.”

Tommy never brought it up again.

Why my parents were not homeowners was not discussed. There were only hints. We seemed no worse off than anyone else in the neighborhood. After my father died, my mother would say only that she had always wanted a house but that my father had a fear of mortgages, and a sense that he would never be able to do the necessary repairs. He was a city boy, a union official most comfortable in a topcoat and fedora, tucking into a plate of chops at a local steakhouse. He also, she told me, had a chance after the Depression to buy the grocery store that he had managed, but had shied away from making the deal.

Then one day I realized something important. I had come home from school and, while fumbling for my keys on the steps, I looked closely, perhaps for the first time, at the screen door, which was ornately designed with a busy pattern of scrolls, swags, and intertwining vines and branches. There, in the center of the door, encircled in a ring of decorative leaf-work, was a great script “L,” looking for all the world like the symbol for the British pound. I knew in that moment that Mrs. LoGerfo's name was the one on the house's title, and my perception of the family dynamics downstairs was turned on its head. I had thought it was nice of the Vigilantes to take such good care of Mrs. LoGerfo, but in that instant I realized how little choice they had. They weren't young people, the Vigilantes, and that house was the key to their economic wellbeing. When I walked the dog in the evening, and I saw fat John Vigilante, a man plagued by multiple hernias, leaning against the gate, pensively smoking a cigarette—he was ordered outside to smoke decades before such a thing was commonly done—I saw that he was practically as much a tenant as I was, his movements just as proscribed.