“It’s right there at the start. With James talking about how young he feels. His saying so implies the opposite. Later, when he’s coming down on his sons and saying what a disappointment they are, that’s all about himself, him feeling threatened and bitter because life hasn’t turned out the way he wanted it to.”
Bless the boy. “Yes, I would agree,” said Penrose. “It’s a conflict that gets developed later. What else is a conflict in the family?”
A few more hands ventured upward, struggling against gravity, and the discussion lurched ahead. Roger inclined his big, pallid, serious face toward each speaker, listening. He had crimped, dark red hair and wore glasses with black plastic frames, like those sold in joke shops attached to false noses. Penrose worried about Roger, worried equally about his awkwardness and his intelligence. One didn’t want to see him head off to grad school as the path of least resistance; besides, he was too genuine and inquisitive to be a good fit in the new, glib order. He might make a good lawyer, or even a politician, if he could find himself a girl, someone to polish his geeky edges, give him a man’s confidence. Of course the girl would have to do all the work. Where was such a girl, brainy but unafraid, who would make a project out of him?
All this passed fleetingly through Penrose’s mind as he directed the class discussion, which was finally starting to jell. All of them had families of one sort or another, and no matter how loving or well-intentioned, there had been times that family life had felt as confined and boxlike as a stage set. There was the usual fascination with Mary’s opium addiction—to think, even a century ago, moms were getting high!—then they started in on the grandiose father and profligate brother, then Edmund himself, who was never quite the hero they wanted him to be. Because of course they wanted to be the ones who picked the scab, who revealed the flaws and hypocrisies of the others while making an attractive display of their own suffering. It was Penrose’s job, or part of it, to convince them that self-loathing was not especially attractive or desirable.
“The mother is just gross,” complained Alexa, flipping her hair from one shoulder to another. “She’s like, shooting up!”
“Like, eww,” said one of the boys, and Penrose gave him a sharp look, but it seemed he was only making fun of Alexa, and that was allowed, even tacitly encouraged.
Another student said that the drug use was all offstage, and that Mary was never unseemly or unladylike. “She’s just lost in a fog, like she wanted to be.”
Penrose got them started on the fog, the foghorn, and then the other physical artifacts—the lamps, the whiskey bottle—and then on to how character flaws were revealed by drama. James’s stinginess, Jamie’s failure, Edmund’s weakness. And how there were also traits that softened our judgment and gave complexity to the portraits. The hour glided past. Penrose felt it was going well. He picked two of the boys to read Jamie’s and Edmund’s parts in the last scene, Jamie’s best:
Never wanted you to succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama’s baby, Papa’s pet! And it was you being born that started Mama on dope. I know that’s not your fault, but all the same, goddamn you, I can’t help hating your guts—
The boys read well, thank God, and some of the wounding and passion came through, enough to turn the motley class into an actual audience, caught up in the play. Penrose himself picked up James Tyrone’s part:
A sweet spectacle for me! My firstborn, who I hoped would bear my name in honor and dignity! Who showed such brilliant promise!
Penrose was enjoying himself. He had a touch of ham in him, though teaching was as close as he’d ever come to acting. Edmund answered, then Tyrone had another line, but just as Penrose was hearing the sound of it in his head, anticipating it, they were all startled by a low, grunting noise from the back of the room. It dropped into the lull between speeches, loud and unseemly, an ugly, honking noise. It took Penrose a moment to identify it as sobbing.
“Sarah?” Penrose took a step forward, peering at the girl in the last row. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head, meaning, Never Mind. She was red-faced, either from embarrassment or her mysterious grief. She waved her hands, waving him off. Never Mind. Penrose hesitated, then, not wanting to make things worse for her, went back to the play. But the air had gone out of it, the class now unsettled and distracted. Penrose stopped the reading. It was almost time for the bell. He began to wrap things up, reminding them of the date their final papers were due, of the review session for the exam. All the while trying not to stare at Sarah Snyder in the back row. Who was she anyway? Unremarkable B student, unremarkable presence bundled into a chubby parka, rimless glasses, straw-blond hair pulled back in a wad. She wasn’t doing anything alarming now, just staring at the desk in front of her, the inflamed color of her cheeks fading.
The bell rang. Penrose dismissed them. He thought of trying to intercept Sarah Snyder—offer some word of concern or inquiry—but she was heading for the door on a bullet course, and besides, Roger was approaching with his usual intelligent questions.
Penrose spoke with him for a few moments, then they parted, and Penrose gathered up his books and went out into the hall. There was no sign of Sarah Snyder, which in some ways was a relief, but left him feeling bad, guilty, inadequate. There had to be a better way to handle such moments. Something intuitive and wise, involving human skills he did not possess. What did girls cry about these days anyway? Boyfriend? Pregnancy? How would he know? He could not now recall a single thing Sarah Snyder had ever said in his class.
He reached his office. The door was shut and locked. He went inside and put his hand to the heating vent. It was the cold of cold metal. It had not been a very good day for the Spiritans.
If there was an easy way to kill herself she’d do it this instant. She was crying again, snotty tears, disgusting, and the cold air made them sting. Could she be any more fucked up? What was wrong with her anyway? She was just a big stupid mess.
Sarah Snyder had escaped the English building and now she hurried across the quad, head down, hunched and shivering inside her big coat. She reached the end of the campus buildings without seeing anybody she knew, or anyone from her stupid class. God! How could she ever go back there? They probably thought her mom was a heroin addict or something.
She slowed her pace, blew her nose on a nasty piece of Kleenex she found in her coat pocket. Here was a coffee shop she sometimes went to, a place she liked for its deliberate shabbiness and the oddball music they played. But she might run into somebody there and she didn’t want to have to act normal or explain why she wasn’t. There was nobody in the world she could explain it to, because there was no real reason for any of it.
So she crossed the street that marked the boundary of campus and kept walking. She had it in mind to get herself good and cold, though she guessed she wouldn’t freeze to death or get consumption, like Edmund. It probably had to be dark for that.
The neighborhood was one of apartment buildings, hutches for students, mixed with small wood-frame houses, one or two stories, which she liked for much the same reasons she did the coffee shop, because they were old, eccentric, mysterious. There was a romance about their porch steps and shade trees, their gravel drives and tumbledown garages. At night their lighted windows were squares and rectangles of tender gold, as if the lives within them gave off a radiance. And there was always the chance that someone might open a door, start down their bricked path at just the time she was passing by, speak to her, ask her name, anything might happen . . .
A stab of remembering, her total spastic idiocy in class, Christ. Poor old Professor Penrose. He’d looked stricken, like he was the one who’d written the play on purpose to make people miserable. Now she bet he thought she had some tragic family she was boo-hooing about, when she had a perfectly normal one—mom, dad, sister, brother—who only drove her crazy in expected ways. She didn’t suppose anyone would believe her, because it was too simpleminded, but it had onl
y been general, goopy sadness, the unfocused sadness of her whole life, that the play had called forth. So that crying for the people in the play had been like crying for herself, but in a nobler way, as if some of the tragedy had rubbed off on her.
There were people whose lives were worth ending up in poems or plays, but she wasn’t one of them. She was just an ordinary head case. So suck it up, Snyder! If her life was a play, she’d probably still be unhappy, but it would make sense, with stage directions and speeches. Why couldn’t she be weird in some interesting way? The occasional car passed, overtaking her without effort as she stumped along. Why didn’t she have a car? She could blast up and down the highway, smash into something.
Eventually she circled a block and doubled back, giving up on the idea of an adventure. She didn’t want to go home just yet; her roommate had a new boyfriend, and while Sarah told herself they weren’t trying to exclude her, sometimes she believed exactly the opposite, that part of the fun of couplehood was the exclusion of other people. It was all very ick-producing, the giggling and the furtive love chats, the hours spent behind the roommate’s closed bedroom door with the music playing, the sounds the music didn’t mask, the unerotic sight of the boyfriend’s bare ass slipping out of its towel wrap as he visited the bathroom, not to mention the residue of those visits. Still, she was envious. She’d never had a real boyfriend, only an ocean’s worth of
hopeless crushes, plus the occasional guy you’d hang out with, and sometimes the two of you would hook up. But sex hadn’t lived up to its billing, at least not so far, one more thing that she guessed worked better as literature.
When she was feeling low and ugly and hopeless, as she was now, she hated everybody: people in commercials made ecstatic by their purchases, politicians screwing up the entire world, anyone who hurt an animal, celebrities, the Walgreen’s clerk who always told her to have a blessed day, people who looked into mirrors and smiled, anyone on MTV, anyone who thought MTV was cool, anyone who used the word “cool,” anyone self-satisfied or loud or rude or whose cell phone ringer was a Justin Timberlake song, that being basically everyone in the whole school.
If she wanted to, she could drop out, move to Seattle or San Francisco or New York and get a real job. It was a big world out there and things were bound to happen to her as they never would here in the Land of Children. College, what was that for most people except a place to kill time before they went on to lead equally shallow adult lives.
She didn’t want to be one of them and of course she was, the whole time she was hating on them.
Without thinking about it, Sarah had retraced her steps across the quad and was standing once more in front of the English building. She hesitated before climbing the stairs and going inside, telling herself it was more than an hour since the end of class, it was unlikely anyone was still around. More than that, she was afraid that if she didn’t make herself go in now, face the scene of the crime, she might put it off forever. And that would be sad because she loved the old building, as she loved anything old and curious and worn, loved its white pillars and dormers and the curving twin staircases on the first floor with their railings rubbed down to the wood grain in places. She loved the stained wood flooring underfoot, as well as the odd cubbyholes, cloakrooms, dim passages, the classroom with the old-fashioned maps mounted on rollers above the blackboard, so that you could pull them down and behold, on crackling antique paper, charts of The Ancient World, or The Voyages of Magellan.
It was the lunch hour and the hallways were uncrowded. Sarah’s nerve failed her at the door of the Drama classroom, empty now, and she turned quickly away. With nothing in mind, as before, she took the stairs to the second floor. Radiators hissed and clanked. Light from the colorless, high overcast sky came in through the stairwell windows. Some kids said the building was haunted, and while Sarah didn’t believe that, she wouldn’t have minded being a ghost there.
Because she loved reading, she loved everything she’d ever read, Alice in Wonderland and A Little Princess and every sappy girl book that had come her way from the third grade on, and Dune and Kurt Vonnegut and Lord of the Rings and Shakespeare (at least the ones she’d seen as movies), and Emily Dickinson and Wuthering Heights and Hemingway and Willa Cather and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. But it wasn’t anything you could impress people with. “I love to read.” Try telling that to a guy at a party, watch how fast he decides he needs to go get another beer.
She was only going to make a circuit of the building and leave—it would be safe to go home soon, her roommate would have to detach herself from the boyfriend and go to work—but she’d pushed her luck too far, and oh crap, here was Professor Penrose, heading straight for her.
At first Sarah thought he hadn’t seen her, since he was walking in that peculiar way he had, as if watching his shoelaces untie. Then, just as she thought she might escape, he raised his head. “Oh, Sarah. Were you looking for me?”
She said yes because no would have been rude, and besides she might have been expected to come looking for him, after her performance in class. And so she had to follow him as he turned around and led the way back to his office. He’d probably been on his way to the bathroom or something. He hadn’t looked all that happy to see her, no surprise there.
He unlocked the office door and went in first, so that Sarah had a moment to look around, get her bearings. She’d only been in here once before, at the very start of the semester, and she hadn’t remembered how beat-up the place was. Even for someone like herself, tolerant of, even enamored of, the secondhand and faded, the room was depressing. Its walls were a peculiar putty color, blotted and freckled like elderly skin. The books in the bookcases looked as if no one had opened them during her lifetime; the old-fashioned blinds at the window were cockeyed. It was cold in here too. It felt like a cell in the Bastille; really, all it needed was some straw on the floor and a few rats, but that was silly, she was the prisoner, the one called to account, and her stomach clenched as Professor Penrose, with his pained, antic smile, invited her to take a seat.
•••
In teaching, as in anything else, there were sins of commission and sins of omission. Penrose had a store of wincing memories, all the times over the years when he’d said the wrong, the clumsy, the hurtful, the fatuous thing. But there had also been the missed opportunities. He had the foreboding that in sitting down with Sarah Snyder, he was about to trade one sin for another. There was likely to be more weeping. Right now she looked sullen rather than teary, but that could turn on a dime, and anyway there was nothing to do now but see it through. “I was worried about you,” he said, after an interval of waiting in vain for her to say whatever it was she’d come to say.
Still she kept silent, a hopeless, obstinate silence, staring straight ahead of her, hands jammed in the pockets of her coat. She was not a pretty girl, which she no doubt knew very well. But surely she could have made a little more effort, or any effort at all, hair, makeup, something other than these hobo shoes, jeans, and an upper garment that could have served as a pajama top. Then, aware that he was not being the supportive, sympathetic elder he aspired to be, he checked himself and asked, “Did you want to talk about your paper?”
She bent over to rummage in her backpack, another unlovely posture, he was forced to notice, retrieved it, and handed it over. Penrose studied it, as if to refamiliarize himself with it. There was no need. It was the same as all her other papers. Dogged, mechanical, neither very good nor notably awful. The B had been a coward’s grade. A C+ would have been more honest. “Characterization in A Doll’s House.” Oh, boredom. Penrose said, “I’m not sure you were all that interested in your topic.”
“I wasn’t.”
Penrose waited, but nothing more came of this unpromising beginning. “Well then, my next question would be, why choose a topic that didn’t interest you?” Why read the play, take the class, go to college in the first place?
The puffy coat wriggled, evidence of some bodily movement underne
ath. Shoulders shrugging? “I don’t know, I guess I couldn’t think of anything else.”
The passing bell rang then, and there was a scattering of noise, distant doors opening, feet on the stairs, voices. The intrusion only emphasized the peculiar intimacy of the small room, and the two of them within it. Although times being what they were, Penrose was always careful to leave his door wide open, so that no hint of impropriety was conveyed, even by such an unlikely Lothario as himself. He began again. “Now you can do better than that. You have to. If you didn’t care for a particular play—”
“I like it a lot,” the girl said with heavy vehemence.
Once more Penrose waited. “All right. What did you like about it?”
“When Nora leaves at the end . . . when she realizes that Torvald isn’t worth it, that she has to go out into the world and be her own person . . .”
She broke off, and resumed her sullen silence. “Well,” Penrose said, “I’m glad you can relate to the character.” He was, of course, biologically disqualified from participating in feminist grievances, although that did not spare him from having to hear all about them. “But your enthusiasm doesn’t really come through in the paper.”
Another convulsion of the coat. “Writing, papers I mean, is really hard for me.”
“Then you need to try and work on that.” She looked unconvinced. “There’s nothing grammatically or organizationally wrong with what you wrote. You just didn’t come up with a strong enough—”
“I don’t know how! I never know how to say I like stuff!”
Do Not Deny Me Page 2
