Nobody said anything, until finally a student in the back row asked, “Which one was Daisy?”
I don’t have a Daisy Buchanan problem anymore. I have Beth, my wife, who shares my bed and my life. I have a job where every day is, if not an adventure, at least interesting. I’m not rich, far from it, but I don’t need to be. Don’t want to be. I have a family. A career. Through the books I read, I can visit any place or any time, and, to paraphrase my pal Atticus, I’m able to step into an infinite number of other people’s shoes.
Week nine and we’re down two more fingers. Week ten and it’s two more, making seven fingers total. Five are pinkies. One’s a ring finger. Britney is missing the middle finger on her right hand now, in addition to the pinky on her left. I’ve started pretending not to notice, because there’s no profit in calling attention to something that everyone with eyes can plainly see. We drag our chairs into a circle, as we always do when it’s time to workshop their stories, and discuss two student manuscripts. One chronicles spring break aboard a cruise ship. Most of the story depicts a beer-pong tournament. The story ends with the sentence, It was the best spring break ever!
“Does anyone else feel that ping-pong maybe isn’t enough conflict?” asks Brian.
“I agree,” Britney says. She lowers her voice and says to the writer, “You’re sort of wasting our time here.”
“Now hold on,” I say. Britney is right, of course, but this isn’t the diplomatic workshop environment I’ve been fostering. I look around at my group of gauze-wearers and fight back a moment of nausea. “We should at least consider the possibility that Bruce has minimized conflict for some larger narrative purpose.”
“No,” Bruce jumps in, “I just wrote it for fun.” He’s a business major, one of the ten-fingered. I shoot him a look, because the author isn’t supposed to talk during his own workshop. It’s a cardinal rule. “It doesn’t have any deep meaning or anything,” he continues, ignoring my glance and further undercutting my pedagogical position. “I’m not trying to be Hemingway.”
“Well, that’s obvious,” Britney says. “I mean—” She catches my eye and stops talking. For the next ten minutes, we discuss the story’s descriptions of the ship’s stateroom, the swimming pool, the grand atrium, the food served at the buffet, the vast sea.
In the second story, a fourteen-year-old girl living in a strict household with deeply religious parents lies to her mother about kissing a boy, and when her mother finds out, she has the girl’s favorite backyard tree cut down branch by branch. Sap spills everywhere. The story is a big hit. The word symbol gets said a lot in our discussion. It isn’t lost on me that only a handful of weeks ago, these same students refused to admit that the beer in Hemingway’s story could symbolize anything.
Everyone has lots to say, and class nearly runs over. This is exactly the sort of student-centered learning that a teacher is supposed to dream about, but as I watch my students file out of the room, still chatting, I wonder just what it is that’s being learned.
What I didn’t tell my class at Penn State all those years ago, what I’ve never told anyone, is that Jessica, my college girlfriend, had been eight weeks pregnant when I left America. It was cowardly of me — I knew it then, know it now — but I was a college junior, just twenty years old, and practically a kid myself. I left her some money and refused to talk to her until it was done.
And it really was an awfully simple operation.
In bed that night, I tell Beth about the growing finger tally. She only knew about the first one. Between the postpartum hormones and lack of sleep, she didn’t need anything else upsetting her.
“Where do you think they all are?” she asks.
“What — the fingers?” The lights are off. It’s eleven p.m. Through the baby monitor, ocean waves crash softly onto shore. “I really don’t know.” I rub the base of her neck awhile in the dark. “I want my students to develop a deeper understanding of the human condition. But not at the expense of their fingers.”
Pillow talk is rare these days. One of us will be up with Twain before long, and most nights Beth and I race toward sleep as if the first one to get there wins a night alone in a motel with free HBO.
“Do you remember that movie?” she says. “The one where the eccentric but devoted English professor gives his blasé students a renewed zest for life?” When we first started dating, we watched movies together all the time in theaters and on sofas.
“Are you talking about all movies?” I ask.
She yawns. “Exactly. It’s a cinematic conceit.”
Beth and I first met the year I moved to Mississippi. She’s literally a sexy librarian. She said she was drawn to my tattoos and my shaved head. She liked that I didn’t look like some crusty old professor. I feigned humility and told her I had no idea what she meant.
She’s originally from Maben and graduated from Mississippi State before going on for a master’s degree in library science at Vanderbilt. She stuck around Nashville for a few years afterward, working at Belmont University before coming home when her mother became ill. She and I had only been dating a couple of months when her mother passed, but instead of returning to her life in Nashville she decided to stick around. I’ll always be grateful to her for that. A tenure-track job in my field is hard to come by, and I can’t just pick up and move. Now she’s a reference librarian here on campus — a good job in her field — and is halfway through the six months of unpaid leave that the college granted her.
“I need some adults-only time,” she tells me the next morning. There are dark circles under our eyes. Twain was up every hour overnight. This has been happening too often lately — I thought we were past all that. But he won’t fall asleep unless he’s wrapped in a swaddle, and then he breaks out of the swaddle and goes nuts until he’s wrapped back in it. But he hates being in it. Over and over again, all night long. I can imagine Twain years from now, a middle-aged man still breaking out of his swaddle ten times a night.
I e-mail my student Latoya to see if she’ll come to the house on Saturday so that Beth and I can put on fresh clothes and cologne and have a date. It will be our first time out together, just the two of us, since Twain was born. Latoya is one of the last ten-fingereds in my fiction-writing class. She’s an honor student double-majoring in English and French and strikes me as especially responsible. She arrives at the house missing a thumb, eager to tell me about the new story she’s working on.
“Sort of O’Connor-esque,” she says, looking around our living room. It’s been overrun with the baby swing, baby mat, piles of laundry we haven’t had time to put away, all the books we read to Twain even though he can’t follow along yet. “It isn’t very redemptive, though,” she says. “I hope—”
“Sweetie,” my wife says, “what happened to your thumb?”
Latoya glances at me, then back at Beth. “It was a dumb accident, ma’am. Totally my fault.” She doesn’t elaborate until Beth is doing a last makeup check in the bathroom.
“You know, the other kids are stupid,” Latoya whispers to me.
I’m holding Twain, who finished nursing before Latoya arrived, and gently patting his back. “How do you mean?” I ask.