December
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this: it makes me feel like I'm doing something for others, being useful, you could say, the same point I was able to make about my monkeys and me once upon a time — when I was fresh out of college, fresh in the classroom, when everyone needed saving and could be saved. After a while, naturally, such thrills rinse into something much paler. I like to imagine I can recall the specific moment of the modification, the stillness between one breath and another when everything became other than it had been. It was, I want to say, a rainy afternoon in November, the maples outside the window bare and bony, the palette having weakened into shades of wet black and gray, the classroom yellow and steamy with teenage hair, soggy sneakers, and Right Guard, and there I was jotting an equation on the chalkboard that answered the question: What do butterflies do in a downpour?
As it happens, the answer is they get the hell out of it because, if you do the algebra, you learn that for a 500-milligram monarch with wings only a few cells thick getting pelted by a 70-milligram raindrop is the equivalent to you or me being battered by water balloons with twice the mass of bowling balls.
I thought this sort of knowledge, if any, would net their attention. I was wrong. You're always looking for ways to fake their lingo while pretending not to fake it, ways to carry information from your solar system to theirs… and then some chimp was chittering behind me, another joining him, and I slipped on my stern expression, began rotating, but, in the adrenaline boil that that rotation took me, something metallic pinged off the chalkboard several inches from the back of my head, paper and books shuffled like crazy, a whootle rose and was answered by a fleeting hodgepodge of honks and howls, and presto:
By the time I faced them, there my class sat, silent as spite, staring back at me decorous and blank and pitiless as a murmuration of Methodists.
The real news took some time to burrow in, as real news does, yet from here, on this mattress in this windowless room half a life later, it feels fast and unexpected as the first flinch in an overweight businessman's left arm.
My hope was in it.
My hope was out of it.
Ping.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I suddenly hated them, it wasn't that, there was nothing sudden about it, and I didn't hate them. I didn't like them, either. It was more—
It was that they saw me, I came to understand in that capsize, as a piece of furniture, a television set with legs, say, even if not quite as surreally amusing. They saw me as something to be endured until they could locate the remote and click me out of their heads, drag their ennui into another channel several hundred yards down the hall in order to think the same thing about the harried woman or man who greeted them there — who, naturally, was thinking much the same thing about them, retaliation being what it is, exhaustion being what it is, although it was inconceivable for such a notion to penetrate their airtight faculties.
And so I may have been turned into a piece of furniture in that first flinch, sure, but it was also the case that they had been changelinged too, becoming a sea of hobbits, homo ergasters, little green lunarians, in my eyes. I felt toward them what any rational being would toward a species she could no longer quite recognize as her own, one that paid homage to voluminous costumes, preposterous customs, shrill plumage, thumpity-bump music, supersonic films in which things went bang in the night, and shiny silver nuggets stuck through eyebrows, noses, nipples, lips, clits, tongues, cocks.
It's a cliché, I know, they're a cliché, I am too, but there you have it, there you will always have it, what a strange tug in the chest.
Unsurprisingly, each of my monkeys saw him or herself as an enfant terrible, a sensitive antihero, a profligate lone wolf, while none fathomed she or he had been and always would be in lockstep with all the other putative enfants terribles, sensitive antiheros, and profligate lone wolves in his or her pack, difference for them amounting at the end of the day to just another way of being the same.
I'm unique! their anxious eyes exclaimed across the classroom every time I glanced up at them from my work. — Aren't I?
Well, of course you are, dears.
Of course you are.
Our entire popular culture is in essence about high schooclass="underline" about reliving it, about its social relations, about the fears it hammers into your plans.
What I knew that they couldn't, know that they can't, what covered such scenes with a gauzy membrane of regret, was that in three years, or five, or ten, tops, when their own hopeful hype had eventually lost heart, they would become precisely the run-of-the-mill lawyers, bankers, pastors, podiatrists, receptionists, accountants, nurses, cooks, clerks, engineers, office managers, rental car agents, taxi cab drivers, electricians, machinists, bartenders, realtors, chefs, stay-at-home moms, deadbeat dads, and — god forbid — high-school teachers whom they sneered at now and believed, ho-hum, they would sneer at forever. Over a relatively short period of time, they would forget completely who they had been in my class, forget my class, forget me, forget that metallic ping, forget that rainy afternoon, just as I would forget them, forget the subtle traits they believed differentiated them from others of their breed — despite the 182 days a year, give or take, we spent staring each other down — and they would grow into the very people they openly ridiculed with that desperate and desperately hackneyed cool.
At least, I remind myself, there is always some minor satisfaction in that.
The metallic ping, rainy afternoon, flip-flop inside my faith took place more than thirty years ago. These days it arrives as no shocker, no pronunciamento, that from one September to another my abecedarians remain basically alike as a boxful of white-headed thumbtacks, you scarcely teach one batch how to parse an unadorned differential and off they toddle, leaving you to start afresh with the next batch slouching through the door, taking in my classroom like a charm of convicts their new digs. Oh, sure, perhaps each autumn the latest troop knows a few grams less about the world of numbers and nominatives than the one that eyed me charily the September before, perhaps they wear nearly imperceptibly different angry identities corporate executives bamboozled them into plucking off shelves at that bright nightmare called the Mall of America, and yet, still, all said and done, they remain, fundamentally, living constants in my own ongoing equations. They remain firm believers in concepts like autonomy because they're the sort that swallow whatever they're told like a handful of colorful gummy bears while pretending to question every dust mite of fact and authority, the sort that play the role of rebels and renegades because they want nothing more than for someone like aging, plumping, drooping me to plop down a few do's and don'ts before them, draw a couple of lines in the regulatory sand, and then tell them they are forbidden to cross at the risk of detention, suspension, expulsion, tamp them down, spell out exactly what they've got to ape in order to fatten into that farrow of adults called us.
Each day I look a little more like the kind of person they're wired to distrust and shit-talk behind her back: the math matron, the Latin Club lady, the increasingly block-shaped old bag in beige slacks, outrageously beflowered blouse, and large tortoise-shell stereotypes with distorting lenses who appears to them a short prim flautist in her fifties. She's the nervous type who measures time by the weeks between one hair-coloring and the next: Moira Lovelace, the ogre most of them, their green theories notwithstanding, will wake up one morning to meet in their own bathroom mirrors. Blink, and you're smacking your panty-pink bubblegum, fidgeting with the combination on your locker, obsessing about those designer jeans with the cute red-thread highlights you just have to have. But blink again, my pretties, and a ball bearing is snapping off the blackboard fewer than a twelve inches from the back of your head and you're standing there thinking: What the fuck did I do to land in a place like this?