Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  “Or do we want to spend another year on Will and Grace?”

  She invoked a recent cause célèbre. A Beet graduate had complained in a lawsuit against the Department of Ethnicity, Gender, and Television Studies that, upon applying for a position at Microsoft, he’d presented his honors thesis, “No Transgender Asians on Will and Grace: An Oversight or an Insult?” The human resources official not only laughed out loud but called in her coworkers and bosses, Bill Gates among them, to share the fun. “Okay,” said Gates after the laughter had subsided. “What did you really study?”

  Akim tried to sound adamant. “I shall stand here until you love me!”

  Matha filled an ice bucket with hot water from the bathroom, reopened the window, and hit her suitor bull’s-eye, drenching his kaffiyeh.

  “I am yours forever!” he yelled back.

  The nihilistic line appealed to Matha mightily; essentially it was what she’d practiced at Magnolia Blossom, minus the ball gowns and the flowers. Writing poetry was new for her, though, and something of an afterthought. She soon realized looks and southern charm were not the appropriate tools for advancement at a place like Beet. To call oneself a poet, on the other hand—which was all one needed to be one—worked out just fine. Her poetry was marked by synecdoche when it was not marked by catachresis or plain impenetrability, which is why she’d avoided Professor Porterfield’s courses, or any of the advanced writing workshops where the students were serious and might give her stuff close reading. On the narrow territory of Beet’s outer fringes, however, Matha was the It girl, and on a morning as momentous as this one, it was to her that Beet’s radicals turned for direction.

  “What do you like mean?” asked Dickie Goldvasser, sole heir to the Goldvasser tungsten fortune in Elko County, Nevada, and who hoped family connections might one day get him into law school. He had hair like shredded carrots and a fearful and astonished gaze. “Like what do you mean, we’ll do it for them? Close the college? May I ask how?”

  “The tried-and-true approach,” Matha said. “We’ll disrupt the place. Today is October 16. We’ve got a little over two months to create time-wasting disturbances.”

  “Let’s kidnap Latin,” said Bagtoothian, meaning Latin the Pig, the school mascot, a picture-perfect Large White who was taken to escaping his pen, galumphing around campus, and peeing everywhere with the range and power of a golf course sprinkler. “If he pisses on us we’ll kill him and eat him.”

  “We’re not killing anybody,” said Matha, to Bagtoothian’s distress. She considered. “We’ll occupy a building! If the tactic was good enough in the sixties, it’s good enough for us.”

  “But it wasn’t good enough in the sixties,” Dickie protested. “It never worked. Not at Harvard, not at Columbia, or Berkeley. Kids just got themselves like beat up by the cops.” His voice quavered. “I don’t want to get like beat up.”

  “Me neither,” said Betsy Betsy, a jittery sophomore who was small enough to fit into a case for a sousaphone, and had Betty Boop eyes without the allure. Effervescent at eighteen, in her fifties she would be a dead lightbulb hanging in a basement in Bridgeport.

  Betsy feigned loyalty to the party line of no gainful employment, but secretly wanted to forge a career as a media reporter. She rationalized her treachery by concluding that media reporting would not really be working.

  “Couldn’t we just walk around yelling things in unison?” she said. “I like it when we do that.”

  Jamie Lattice, a junior, said nothing, but his tiny old man’s face twitched at the thought that if he went to jail he might never realize his membership in the New York literati. What he most wanted was to be a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and he was debating whether to write a how-to book or a cookbook to win the honor. Before coming over to Matha’s room he’d spent twenty minutes at the mirror, practicing a look that combined Age of Innocence promise with fin de siècle despair.

  “For shit’s sake!” Matha exploded. “They’re not going to beat us up. In the sixties, the colleges didn’t give a shit about their shit-ass image because they weren’t worried about money. But now they’re all going broke, and they’re oh-so-careful about how they come across on TV. These shitheads are not going to call the cops, I promise you. They’ll call the incident ‘unfortunate’ or ‘disturbing’ or ‘sad’ or some fuck like that.” Then she added: “You have to remember: The professors of today were yesterday’s protestors.”

  “But I still don’t see why we have to close the college,” said Betsy.

  “It’s a statement,” said Matha, who was about to add “shitnose,” but held back because she knew Betsy would burst into cartoonsize tears for little or no reason. “We close down Beet College, dear old much-sought-after Beet College, to show the world that college is useless. Who needs it? I mean, look at the situation this morning. That ass-shit Bollovate and his brains-for-shit trustees were about to close the place for a few bucks anyway. What difference does it make who shuts the college down? What is college for? Zip! And what do we do when we graduate? Make indie films about sex in Tribeca? Tread water in graduate school? An M.F.A., for fuck’s sake?” The group guffawed. “We’re toast! That’s the statement we want to make.” She considered a moment. “You know what? I think we’re the lost generation. That’s what I think. We should call ourselves The Lost Generation.”

  Her comrades were confused but aroused. “That’s a great name,” said Jamie. “The Lost Generation.” He thought of using it in his inaugural essay for Harper’s.

  “What building do you want to take?” asked Bagtoothian, who was watching Akim out the window, still itching to get at him.

  That required some discussion. If they took the administration building, it would not mean much because the dither of deans would vacate their offices gladly and await instructions from President Huey. If they took President Huey’s office, he would vacate gladly and await instructions from Bollovate or from anyone else with instructions. If they took a departmental building, that would do no damage at all because the faculty members were always ready to turn against the administration on the slightest provocation, or none, or to turn against one another.

  Pity, the one professor whom Matha and her cohorts could not count on to betray either the administration or his colleagues was the same Professor Porterfield to whom the salvation of Beet College had been entrusted. That dismayed Matha. In seeking to close Beet down, she was in reality on the side of the trustees, who, the natural businesswoman in her surmised, would rather dump Beet and cut their losses than keep it going. If Peace Porterfield saved the college, said Matha, the radical movement would be no more, since closing the college was their one true cause.

  “So let’s take Porterfield’s office,” said Bagtoothian, who merely wanted to push someone down a flight of stairs.

  “No. He’s too well-liked,” Matha said. “It’s not a matter of singling out an individual. We have to occupy something that is central to Beet, and better still, central to a liberal arts education in general, so when the rest of the country sees what we’ve done, they will know that not just Beet College but higher learning itself has been brought to its knees.”

  “Let’s take the Free Speech Zone,” said Goldvasser. Everyone chortled.

  The Free Speech Zone, a twelve-by-twelve-foot plot of lawn at the far west end of the campus, was the area in which anyone connected with the college could voice an opinion. It was created in response to complaints, mainly from faculty members, that things were being said in the dorms and the classrooms, on the pathways, and in the bathrooms as well, that offended some people, or could be construed as offending some people, or might have offended some people had the remarks been heard. The first speaker to make use of the new area was a sophomore from Pennsylvania who stood dead center in the grassy square, cupped her hands to her mouth, and shouted that she had mixed feelings about the Quakers.

  The students considered, then all five said it at once. “The library! Let’s take Bacon Lib
rary!”

  “The library!” said Dickie.

  “The library!” said Betsy.

  “The library!” said Bagtoothian, who had not yet set foot in one, but looked forward to the adventure.

  “The library?” asked Jamie, who anticipated he would be ill the night of the takeover.

  “So it’s the library,” said Matha.

  It was an impeccable choice. How better to put an end to institutions of higher learning—perhaps even to learning itself—than to pull down the very warehouse of learning, the time-honored repository of the best that was ever thought or felt, and keep it from future generations? Bacon Library was the lifeblood of the college. Matha and her comrades had hit upon a course of action at last, and yet an action that would effect inaction, the great work stoppage of the mind.

  Not only that: the library displayed the Mayflower Compact—a document, in terms of pure rarity, even more valuable than the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Though the original compact did not exist, the William Bradford copy in Bacon was a treasure in part because Mayflower passenger Bradford was the first governor of the Plymouth Colony. The document, dated 1630, was signed by John Alden and Miles Standish, among other notables, and was the first written American expression of the intent to “combine together in a civil body politic.”

  “Damn!” said Matha. “We bring down the library, we bring down the college, we bring down the country!”

  “Is that like a good thing?” said Goldvasser.

  They looked to one another, but no one knew for sure.

  “When do we go? Tonight?” asked Bagtoothian.

  “No,” said Matha. “It’s got to be planned out. I think we should wait till Porterfield’s committee is about to make its report to the faculty. There’s a meeting on December nineteenth, which is probably when they’ll do it. If we go in on the eighteenth, that should shit things up, or fuck them up, or something.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?” said Lattice, hoping that in the meantime they’d drop the plan.

  “Small stuff,” said Matha. “Minor annoyances that get in the way of the committee.”

  The group was happy and high-fived one another to prove it, and low-fived one another as well, and bumped chests and fists. Most of their courses demanded no intellectual effort. But a series of disruptions? That was something they could sink their teeth into.

  “Use for the useless!” cried Matha, not entirely sure what she meant.

  “Use for the useless!” cried the others.

  “My darling! My sweet! My heart is breaking!” Producing his iPod, on which he’d recorded a medley of Syrian love songs, Akim sang along with “My Sheep Are in the Pasture.”

  Matha nodded to Bagtoothian. “Now.”

  CHAPTER 3

  LIVI WAS ON A TEAR AGAIN. HER EYES BLAZED GREEN, AND she yanked at her hair, which looked on fire. “Keelye Smythe? That snake in the grass? You appointed Keelye Smythe?”

  “I can handle him.”

  “That’s what you always say. Jesus, Mary, and Moses! I married a babe in the woods!”

  “I know what Keelye is, but he’s also smart.”

  “Everybody’s smart. But not everybody’s good.”

  “Well, pickings weren’t exactly cherse.”

  “Because the only people who want to join committees are jerks.”

  That was their conversation of the previous night, when Peace told Livi whom he had named to the CCR, the shorthand by which Peace’s committee on curriculum reform was now known. He’d used the two days since the Day of the Bollovate to select the members. He knew he might have done better, but he was pressed for time—two months to come up with a plan to save the college—and while it may have been hard for Livi to believe, the six he’d come up with appeared to be the best of the applicant pool.

  Pickings from Peace’s own department had been the slimmest. Apart from Smythe, applicants included the minor poet WillaGeorge, founder of the Beets, a local group in the 1960s who rebelled against Kerouac’s bunch, pooh-poohed jazz, ridiculed Zen, said no to drugs, and wrote blank verse; Johnny Claque, the only independently wealthy department member, who’d struck it rich with a bodice-ripper, and was said to be one; and Larry Gunderson, the Shakespearean who could recite the 128th Sonnet in 5.3 seconds, and could not be stumped on questions about Edmund Spenser, no matter how hard one tried.

  Manning had told him so—“I told you so”—earlier in the day, when Peace was putting his committee together. “This assignment will bring you in contact with every mad dog in the college.”

  “Very helpful. Instead of being so all-knowing,” said Peace, “why don’t you serve on the CCR yourself?”

  “Because I only look crazy.”

  On the morning of October 17, Peace crossed the quad of the Old Pen toward the CCR’s first meeting in Bacon Library. He was already beginning to feel he’d entered a new world, and in some ways he had. He had never served on a major committee, much less headed one, either here or at Yale, where a lowly assistant professor was not accorded the honor. One of the less substantive reasons he was so well-liked at Beet was that he had not been involved in its business. All he knew about being a professor was students, teaching, and learning, and this skewed and narrow prospect of academic life deprived him of the full, rich picture.

  “Down with Beet! Close the college!” chanted Matha and her band of revolutionaries. They stomped back and forth on the lawn.

  “You want to close the college?” Peace asked them as he walked past. But they kept chanting and drowned him out.

  Reaction from the faculty to the news of his assignment was as swift as Matha Polite’s. It ran the gamut from sneering contempt to indifferent contempt. As long as young Professor Porterfield kept his head down, there had been no reason to anoint him with the traditional loathing reserved for the prominent. But, as the Japanese say, the nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered. On the other hand, Peace’s sudden celebrity, however shaky, opened the path for others to share in it. So the outward response of his colleagues—save Manning, of course—was boisterous bonhomie, which gave Peace the willies.

  But the sight of Bacon was always reassuring to him. One of the few structures not built in the small-college idiom, the library filled the south end of the stockade of the Old Pen, grand and solid, its dusty Ionic columns crowned by volutes curled downward like inverted scrolls. Something about the height of the steps and the stylobate made the building appear even larger than it was, and when taken in from a distance, it seemed forbidding, like a bank vault. Perhaps for that reason, some years earlier an anonymous wag chalked a notice on the outer wall that read: “This is not the library. The library is inside.”

  “Professor Porterfield?”—Peace was about to mount the steps. “We’ve never been formally introduced. I’m Professor Marigold Jefferson—of the I Am Woman Center?” She wore her hair in tight blond curls, which though real, looked like a wig. And she had the half-sloshed eyes of a giraffe, and seemed as tall. Peace nodded. He knew little about her, save that the previous spring she’d written and performed a one-woman play at the Beet Theater Club, called Yeast, in which she dressed as the infection. Reviewers found it “vile yet brave.”

  “I hope you won’t find this presumptuous,” she said. “But I just wanted to say that whatever curriculum you come up with, it should feature the work of Mariah Carey. Don’t you agree?”

  “I’m not sure I understand you,” said Peace. Jefferson was the sort of person he feared most from his childhood—sixties-generation friends of his parents who used a stare of aggressive innocence to coax others into crazy and dangerous situations.

  “You know my work on Mariah Carey?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “It’s considered seminal. I’ve been writing a book-length essay on Mariah as the nexus of American song and dance. It would fit into the new curriculum beautifully, don’t you think?”

  Not knowing what to say
, Peace smiled faintly and continued on, but had not progressed three steps when the radicals’ favorite, Tufts Godwin—Professor Sensodyne of the Sensitivity and Diversity Council—called his name. Godwin had hair like a thatched roof with no house under it, and the vague and hulking form of a woolly mammoth. Peace had successfully avoided his company for four years, but, as Manning had predicted, after the Day of the Bollovate there would be no avoiding anyone.

  “A word, Professor Porterfield?” His eyes seemed to peer out from pallets of fur, with the sharp and brainless scrutiny of an animal. “I’m sure you must be sensitive to this, but you and your committee have a great opportunity to do something for the plagiarists.”

  “What are you talking about?” That came out more harshly than Peace intended.

  “Well, you know how poorly they are thought of, I mean still, right now, as if we weren’t living in the twenty-first century.” Peace kept waiting for a signal to laugh. “We at S and D have come to think of plagiarists as our last civil rights issue. For God’s sake, some Neanderthals still treat them like lepers.”

  “But they should be treated like lepers,” said Peace. “They’re thieves.” It came to him that Godwin chaired a committee that had let off a sophomore charged with plagiarizing Emerson’s Self-Reliance word for word, changing only “whoso would be a man must be non-conformist” to “whoso would be a person with human feelings.” The student had explained his work as an homage.