Lauren Takes Leave

by Gerstenblatt, Julie

  I had become a Georgie puppet. I wasn’t sure the package was authentically “me,” but it sounded really good, and made me seem really together, and for a while, that was more than good enough.

  Because, having that letter of recommendation from the country’s leading educational activist helped me land any job I wanted. And, at the time, there was nothing that I wanted more than to teach in prestigious Hadley, New York.

  It took me quite a while to detox from all that Georgie-speak. To this day, fifteen years later, I still find myself using only green pens to grade tests. I use pencils to write on essays, believing that this will show students that, while their words are permanent, mine are erasable, mere suggestions meant only to help push their thoughts further.

  If there’s one person who can get me out of my run-fast-from-my-middle-school funk, it’s Georgie. Hell, I’d even bet that she can inspire me on a personal level. If Georgie told me to have sex with my husband every night for the next two years, I would do it. Well, I’d seriously consider it, at any rate.

  I wait for her to finish talking to some adoring fans before approaching the front of the room. She spots me and smiles, breaking away from the group.

  “Lauren! So good to see you!” We hug and I get swallowed by her ample bosom. Georgie’s just big in every way. “I was delighted when I got your text last night.” She steps back to study me. “You look younger.”

  “I do?” I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. My hand flies up to touch my forehead gingerly, unwittingly drawing attention there. I snap my arm back down to my side. It’s the first time that anyone’s noticed the Botox and I’m not sure how to react.

  “Mm,” she says, cocking an eyebrow knowingly. “I like it.”

  I relax. Having Georgie’s approval still means something to me, even if it’s unrelated to the field of education. I am a bit surprised, though, since I would have assumed surface changes were not her style.

  She stops to speak to a few more students before we leave the lecture hall, then leads the way to her office, a gorgeous, loft-like expanse with casement windows, open to let the breeze in, overlooking the quad. On the way, we chat about life—hers, at any rate—her research, her travel plans, her life’s goals being checked off the master list one by one.

  “And you?” Georgie asks, once we’ve settled in to some chairs around a circular table in her office, each with a steaming cup of coffee in hand.

  “And me.” I say, considering the multiple-choice answers I could pick from. I go with A: Home Life. “I have two demanding, draining, life-sucking—although wonderful, the best ever, wouldn’t trade them for anything!—school-age children. They’ve grown so fast, and sometimes I feel like I don’t matter in their lives anymore, except as a chauffeur. And my husband is never really home until after I’ve put the children to bed, so I feel…lonely. Sometimes I feel like screaming for no reason,” I say, feeling like screaming. The concerned look in Georgie’s eyes is penetrating.

  I don’t want to lose my shit in front of her, so I switch focus. “However, I’m still teaching middle school in Hadley. And loving it, of course,” I add as an afterthought. “You know me, I’ll never tire of those sweaty, fidgety, ADHD middle schoolers!” Okay, maybe that went a bit too far.

  She nods thoughtfully. “What about your interest in leadership?” she asks.

  “Oh yeah, that,” I say, wishing I had just stuck to the miseries of home life. I then have to explain to my idol how I was recently passed over for the chair position in the English Department for an outsider with nepotism on her side. “Despite my fine pedigree, exemplary teaching, and good rapport with parents,” I add, with only a hint of sarcasm to my voice. “Despite the fact that I did everything right.” I feel my eyes sting again and I fight back tears. Georgie doesn’t do tears.

  “It is something you still care about,” she states rather than asks.

  “I don’t know what I still care about?” It comes out as a question. Maybe Georgie will answer it for me. That would be nice. She can just tell me what to do so that I can find my way back on course and do it. That’s what I liked so much about high school, and college, and grad school, too, come to think of it. There was structure. I took courses and was handed assignments. Teachers just told me where to be and what to do. And as long as I followed the general rules and did my homework, I could coast through.

  Maybe I picked teaching as a career because school was the only world I really knew. And maybe—it occurs to me fifteen-plus years too late—that kind of default thinking is lame and lazy.

  “Hmm.” She actually cocks her head to study me, as if I am some type of rare or exotic bird she’s never seen up close before. As if I might become something for her to research. She picks up a pen and begins jotting some notes on a pad. “And, so, what brings you here today?”

  I think about the excuses I came up with on the train, and pick the one that sounded best in my head.

  Then I meet Georgie’s gaze and mentally erase that idea. Who am I kidding? I can’t lie to her, of all people. Besides which, I need to tell her the truth so that she can help me make sense of it.

  “Because I’m cutting school like a truant teenager?” I smile.

  “Interesting.” Georgie nods, scribbling more notes.

  “Which I’m doing because I’m experiencing a tad bit of a midlife crisis?”

  “Been there!” she says, holding her palms skyward as if I’ve just found God. I expect her to add an “Amen!” but she doesn’t, which is kind of disappointing.

  Bolstered by the freeing feeling of truth-telling and the enthusiastic support from Georgie, I’m on a roll. “Because I thought I could get a few days off from my life by sitting on jury duty, only the courts totally screwed with that plan and now I’ve got to come up with creative field trips to keep me busy and out of Hadley each day?” I say-ask.

  “Mmm, mmm, hmm.” Georgie is shaking her head at me with a big fat no that actually means a hearty yes. She jots more notes on the yellow pad in front of her, definitely using a red pen. I call her on it.

  “What, this?” she says, motioning to her hand. “It’s just a pen. It’s not devil worship or anything.”

  “But…!” I launch into my story of the complete and utter fear I have had of red pen usage in United States classrooms for the past decade and a half. “I don’t even let the school secretaries order them from Staples anymore. I’ve tried to change the entire culture of my school to red-pen adverse.”

  “Well,” she says. “That’s just extreme, Lauren.” She shakes her head and goes back to taking notes on me.

  I am stunned into silence. Either Georgie’s changed her tune completely or I really misunderstood my entire two-year graduate program here at Harvard.

  “But…I thought…sacrilegious…doesn’t honor the students…demeaning…testing is very good…or is it very bad…?” I trail off, confused.

  Georgie shrugs. “Testing is whatever you want it to be, Lauren, whatever you need in order to teach your children the things they must know. And teaching is not about the color of the ink in a pen! It’s about the woman holding that pen in her hand. You should know that.”

  “But you used to say…”

  “Used to. Not anymore. Now I’m all about the freedom to choose.”

  “The freedom to choose…what?”

  “Exactly,” she says. “The freedom to choose what. Only you know the answer to that.”

  “What about the ten commandments?”

  She cackles loud and deep. “What am I, God? I woke up one morning about two years ago and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked tired. I was tired! I was tired of telling people what to do, of how to teach, of how to live, even if it was mostly good advice, mostly done to make lives better. I mean, it was all great at first. But over the years, something changed. I suddenly had a lot to live up to. People expected me to always have the answers, so I gave them answers, telling them red pens were damaging, that testing was the way or
definitely not the way. Truth is, what did I know? I swear to you, that one morning, I said to my reflection, Georgina Parks, you do a hell of a lot of preaching for a mere mortal. Maybe it’s time to stop being in charge of everything all the time. And, you know what? It felt empowering to let go.”

  “But this morning…I heard you. You sounded the same as always, powerful and sure. There were disciples taking notes!”

  She laughs again, wiping a tear from her eye. “I know. People like to have something to believe in, Lauren. They need to have something to strive for. Don’t you? Why did you come visit me today?”

  My knee-jerk response would be “Because of a sweater,” but that sounds insulting and empty.

  Why did I visit Georgie? “For the same reason these students do, I suppose. To feel a part of something important. And,” I add as an afterthought, “to have someone give their lives direction.”

  “And so that’s what I do. But occasionally, it strikes even me as crazy to believe so much in me.”

  Something indeed is crazy. Georgie’s ironclad rules about how to teach and what to teach and when to teach just don’t exist anymore? Or they do, only she no longer really believes in them?

  “Girl, listen to me,” she starts. I love the “girl” thing. It’s so familiar and yet so authoritative at the same time. When Georgie is addressing a crowd and is looking for the same effect, she’ll use “people,” like she did during this morning’s lecture. And when she’s got you one-on-one and wants to drive a point home, nothing is more effective than “girl.”

  With the use of “girl,” I feel sure that she will settle this confusion once and for all and say what I need her to say, say what she used to say.

  “No wonder you need a little break from teaching. You take it way too seriously.”

  Seriously?

  Until this moment, there was an urn on a pedestal in my mind, reserved for all that wisdom gleaned from Georgie. Now, broken shards are all that’s left of this vessel that once contained everything I found sacred about education, everything I thought was true in the world. I mentally begin the process of cleaning up a few pieces, avoiding the really sharp ones.

  I think back to the way I just dismissed Martin on Monday morning, letting him conjure an entire book plot from thin air. I think about the way letting him off the hook made me feel like I was also off the hook.

  Then I look at Georgie’s face and start to see her for the first time. She looks back, interested. “Yes?” she asks. “I know, I know, it’s shocking! You thought I was a demigod, too, didn’t you?”

  “I guess,” I say, not wanting to sound like the complete follower I have been. What are the right words for this particular scenario, the one in which your life’s mentor reveals that she’s not All That? “So…let me get this straight…you’re like the Wizard of Oz?”

  Georgie laughs good-naturedly. “I love it! Yes! Pull aside the curtain and see just how regular I am.”

  I watch her as she gets up and moves around her office, sorting through piles of mail and manila folders. “My point is, Lauren, that we’re all fallible, we’re all human. I still believe that literacy is power and that denying children access to that power will keep them down and keep this country from competing in the global economy. The opposite is attainable, though: healthy, literate Americans will change this world, you will see. But am I the only one who can provide structure, answers, plans? Is my word the be-all and end-all of educational opportunity? Hell no.”

  Hell no?

  I don’t think the Wizard of Oz was quite that fierce when he gave it up for Dorothy and the gang.

  “So…what does all this ‘freedom’ of yours mean for me?”

  Georgie smiles, her dark eyes warm and encouraging. “I think you know the answer to that.”

  I hate to look weak in front of such greatness, but this discussion is not going the way I had expected, right? So I might as well be perfectly honest, like Georgie. “Um. Pretty sure I don’t.”

  “It will come to you. Just open yourself to the possibility that things can be different. That maybe you are not the master of your so-called master plan.”

  I’m totally not sure what that means, but I’m not about to argue.

  “Don’t look at me like that, little lost puppy!” she jokes.

  I continue looking at her like a little lost puppy.

  “Okay, fine,” she sighs. “I may have an idea for a project that could involve you. I have to sort through some notes, first. I am switching gears, too, you see. I’m feeling a bit stale after spending twenty-five years on one cause. It’s fun to mix it up! So, now I’m thinking about researching women instead of children. Still looking at empowerment. But now focusing on midlife issues. I have to sort through some notes first. No promises.”

  “Ooh! I’m a woman! I’m in midlife! I have issues! Plus, I’ve been taking some notes about a similar topic!” I stop to take a breath. “What’s it—”

  Georgie’s palm silences me. “Enough for now. Did I or did I not just say that I am tired of being responsible for other people’s lives?”

  I nod my head like an obedient puppy.

  Georgie comes back to the table and sits. “Lauren, I have always thought of you as one of my best students—particularly when it came to research—but you lacked your own voice, and your own passion and drive. In class, you hung on my every word, reciting me back to me. I worry now that what I saw in you was just a mirror of myself. So. Before I give you this opportunity, I need to know that it really is your promise I was seeing, and not merely my own. Prove to me that you can accomplish something meaningful on your own, and then we’ll talk.”

  I think about what she’s saying and I crack a half smile, an idea forming. “Would you like me to bring the Wicked Witch’s broom to you as proof of my bravery?”

  “Girl,” Georgie says with a wink, “you do whatever it takes.”

  Chapter 12

  “Champagne?”

  A very cute young man in a tux is standing next to me at the Chanel makeup counter, silver tray in hand. When I’m stressed out, trying on expensive makeup that I’m never going to buy, and/or painting my nails all different colors, makes me feel enormously better. In the last ten minutes, I have applied bronzer, liquid eyeliner, two different eye shadow colors, and a few other products to my face. I’ve fibbed to salespeople left and right, telling them that, yes, I’d love to buy their products. Next to one register, there’s a pile of small boxes with my name—Dorothy Gale—attached on a yellow Post-it.

  Georgie has driven me to the cosmetological brink.

  I put down the newest limited-edition nail polish I have been trying and delicately pick up a glass flute.

  “Thanks!” I say. “You read my mind!”

  I didn’t even know that you could drink alcohol at Neiman Marcus, much less for free, but I’m not going to question it. I down one glass and reach out for another, before you can even say “Bobby Brown.”

  I amble the main floor and collect my thoughts.

  Maybe Georgie is dying.

  She looked really healthy, though. No loss of hair, weight, energy, or bravado, that’s for sure.

  I remove the strawberry perched on the edge of the champagne flute and take a bite.

  Sparkly jewels stare back at me from under locked glass cases. They seem sad, unreachable like that. I imagine them calling out to me like puppies in a shelter, Take me home! It’s so cold in here! or I’m the one you want! I put my face up against the case, listening.

  No one can hear diamond-encrusted distress calls from under the protective glass.

  I pull back, considering Georgie again.

  Maybe I’m losing my hearing.

  Or maybe she just means what she said.

  Maybe everyone’s just tired of working so hard.

  Maybe being a full-time grown-up just sucks that way.

  Even if you’re Georgina Parks, professor emeritus at Harvard University and head of your own educational think
tank.

  I do think I’ve learned at least one thing today. Perhaps we need to cut ourselves—and each other—some slack. Perhaps I have to figure out what’s real and what’s hiding behind the metaphorical curtain.

  I finish the second drink and place it on a passing tray. The waiter hands me a postcard announcing the Christian Louboutin shoe event. Buy a pair today and receive a gorgeous faux-gold cuff bracelet, as shown in the picture. Also, if you purchase a pair, your name will be entered into a $5,000 Neiman Marcus shopping spree.

  Well.

  That just sounds too good to be true.

  I wander over to the shoe department, you know, just to have a look.

  On the train ride home, I’m feeling a little bit headachy and a little bit remorseful. But then I peek into the large shopping bag seated next to me and smile. Those black Louboutin spiky heels with the red soles are really hot. And now they are really mine.

  I’ve never spent so much on a pair of shoes in my life. I feel simultaneously nauseated and empowered. Not in the way Georgie would use the word, but still. Like I could kick someone’s ass in those heels. I’m starting to see why women have shoe addictions. I’m just not sure how they pay for this bad habit.

  Unless they use creative cash-back programs like Jodi does.

  I will say that opening a credit card at Neiman’s was genius. It will allow me to acquire points toward future purchases while also hiding the bill from Doug as I slowly pay it off.

  Jeez. That’s some warped logic right there, is it not? I’m sounding a bit too much like Jodi for my own liking.

  I yawn and feel the champagne mellow me out. The calming rock and roll of the train soothes me. Vacations are exhausting, I think, and expensive, my mind adds, before sliding into a gentle nap.

  I wake to find a bunch of e-mails from Lenny, all of them asking about Georgie and hinting at jealousy.

  From: lkatzenberg@yale.alumni.edu

  Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie

  Kissed Lauren and made me cry

  When the boys came out to play,

  Georgie Porgie pushed Lenny away.