A Round-Heeled Woman (14 page)

Every afternoon at four he called Sylvia. He had never lied to me about Sylvia. In his first letter, he told me that he had been companions with a woman for almost two years, that they did not live together, that increasingly their interests did not match, their tempers flared. But, he warned, he was not ready to make a break. “And so I will have to scheme when we're in New York together. She will e-mail me and occasionally call. And I will have to be loving. You will have to hear me tell her that I love her.” And so every afternoon at four Robert would sit at his desk along the outer wall of the walk-in closet. Who was I kidding that the man I was in love with could talk affectionately to a woman and I not mind? It was not possible for me to sit comfortably on the couch and work the puzzle. Where was I to go? Where could I hide?

The bathroom. Every afternoon at four I went to the bathroom. I turned on the water in the sink full blast and sat on the toilet until I heard Robert call, “You can come out now, sweetie.” I began to scrub the bathroom. On hands and knees in the corners behind the bowl, in the bowl, the tub, the walls, the sink. On the toilet I tried and tried, harder and harder, to rid myself of the shit that had accumulated and now impacted me until I thought I would burst. Finally, I did burst. I felt a rip, a dreadful tear, inside me, and when I looked into the bowl, the water was red with my blood.

It is Super Bowl Sunday, the day of contests among advertisers. Neither of us caring especially who wins, Madison Avenue or the NFL, Robert invites me to the Allstate Bar and Grill on West Seventy-second, just around the corner and up the street. It is a wonderful place, old, two steps down from the street, all but hidden. Inside is all old wood and working people along with a table of New York women who look as if they carry a lot of baggage with sharp edges. Robert drinks martinis, I scotch on the rocks. We talk very little. I recall that in the first days of my visit, dressed in my long skirt with the slit, a red cashmere sweater, ready for the opera, I said to Robert, “How do I look?”

“You look like someone I could love,” he said.

After two weeks of unimagined intimacy, it is clear that he doesn't.

Next morning, in the cab that takes me to JFK, I look down at my hands. I am bleeding from every cuticle.

ELEVEN

Higher Education

What I want is to show students that they have the strength to cope
with all the truth they perceive. . . . I want to show students that they
are strong enough to deal with complexity and paradox without
denying its existence.

—STEPHEN BOOTH, Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California at Berkeley

Q: What do you teach?
A: Sustained ambiguity.

—JANE JUSKA, award for Best Field Trips, Ygnacio Valley High

Thanks to Robert and New York and falling in love and not being fallen in love with, I have missed the beginning of the spring semester. Not for the first time, I am grateful to my profession for being so forgiving and at the same time so demanding. It requires of me my absolute and undivided attention. It compels me to ignore everything else in my life, to put my needs and wants and demands and cries for attention aside and pay attention to those who might just possibly be more important than I.

The students I teach at St. Mary's College are going to be high school and middle school teachers. For this I love them before I even meet them. What in the world would possess a man or woman to choose to enter the teaching profession at this time in our century? A number of my students over these past years are older; that is, they have left careers in sales, computers, journalism, the military. We want to make a difference, they say. Larry, formerly a commercial real estate developer in San Francisco, tells us that all the years he was making big money, he missed history. He said he found himself sneaking off to read books until one day he quit developing real estate and came here to learn to teach. Paula spent two years in Kosovo with the Peace Corps. “I didn't know enough about teaching English,” she said. “I want to learn to do that well. Then I'm going back.” She hesitates. “Unless my fiancé wants to go back to Vietnam, then I'll go there.” My job is to prepare them for life in the classroom. I do the best I can. We read scholarly articles on gender discrimination, financing, vouchers. They write papers. I read them. In addition, I tell them some of what I learned in my thirty-three years with kids. Now, please understand: I do not offer a lecture on sex in the classroom, but gradually, over the course of the semester, in response to my students' questions and concerns, which mount as they assume the responsibilities of classroom teaching, the following makes itself known: there is a lot of sex in the classroom. High school and middle school and no doubt school from the very beginning is larded with sex, and no teacher or vice principal or superintendent or president of the world can insist that kids leave sex at the doorway and expect that it will happen.

My mother tried to convince me not to become a teacher by telling me that students really notice what the teacher wears. I, of course, decided not to become a teacher because what my mother was really saying was that kids look at your body. They look at their own bodies and the bodies of one another, their natural curiosity dampened by rules as they grow up. So I was twenty-seven years old before I got so bored with being a medical secretary that I didn't care who looked at my body. My mother's response, when I told her I was going back to school to get a credential, was, “Oh, Jane, we hoped for better things from you.” She herself had been a teacher for one year until my father-to-be rescued her.

In the classroom kids bump against each other by mistake and by design. Boys punch each other, shove each other, fall into each other, in a kind of homoerotic working out of their own identity. Girls, more and more, do this overt physical stuff, too; in our liberation, behaving like boys was the way to express that we were up from slavery. Thus, girls began to curse and did it loudly inside and outside the classroom; they began to fistfight, and there was no greater treat for the student body at large than a noontime ruckus between girls. “Girl fight!” someone would yell, and everybody would come running and quickly form a circle around the combatants to protect them from anyone like a teacher or an administrator who might try to break up the fight. Girls use fingernails, so often girls' fights are bloodier than boys'. The fights are always about boys.

The overt sexuality of girls, apparent in what passed for fashion, was something everyone—teacher and student alike— had to adapt to once the hippie era, featuring suggestively sexy neck-to-ankle cover-ups, was over. Dress codes never worked for very long: the school couldn't send half the student body home because of infractions of a rule like “No spaghetti straps.” In many classrooms, beginning in the eighties and continuing up to my retirement in 1993, the chairs were arranged in a horseshoe. Girls sat, some unaware, some fully aware, that their teeny skirts had slid way, way up, that their legs sprawled, one hither and one yon, providing visual access to anyone—boys, girls, teachers—to parts of them better saved for another venue. Teachers, most of us, learned to gaze deeply into the mascaraed lash extenders of our girls, hoping that life as we knew it might be happening somewhere in there. Of course, some of the girls who sat splayed were very much aware of what they were doing and found this kind of play far more interesting than Huck and Jim, and, for sure, Hamlet and Ophelia. In the faculty lounge, we teachers used to entertain ourselves by imagining the perfect couple, who, copulating in front of the class, would hold the attention of our kids for more than one minute. Madonna and one of them? Keanu Reeves and Cher?
Eeeuw!
We never found the perfect couple, but I'm thinking right this very minute, How about Britney Spears and Ricky Martin? Britney and Madonna? Ricky and . . . Ricky.

For several years now, girls have featured their breasts. Even the most modest among them wear stretch tops, breasts peeping or spilling out of the V necks, the more daring wrapping their breasts in a bandeau that covers the nipples but not much else. Currently, it is the fashion for girls to present to the world at large their naked torsos—a wide swath of skin extending from just below the breasts to somewhere below the navel, which may or may not be pierced. Naked in their middles, girls often wear on their feet Doc Martens, heavy, black, dangerous-looking boots or shoes, steel-toed being the absolute finest. The message? “Look—you can't help it—but touch and I'll kick you in the balls.” My sympathies these days lie with the boys. A story about Knute Rockne has it that he forbade his players to have sex during the season. His advice to them was “Wear corduroy pants and walk fast.” Too bad corduroy is out.

Teachers are not immune to any of this. We have all heard of affairs between students and teachers. But those unhappy arrangements are few. Occasionally, one hears of a teacher behaving outrageously, like one of my colleagues who strode up and down in front of the classroom and said to his students, “Look at me and tell me if I had sex last night.” The problem for the teacher arose when the kids turned a deaf ear and a blind eye: they didn't care. This guy was a joke.

Another colleague decided to come out to his classes. He videotaped himself delivering an impassioned speech to his first-period kids; he played the tape for all four of his remaining classes. He wanted to get fired. He wanted to take his case to the Supreme Court. He wanted to be somebody. The kids cut him off at the pass. They just shrugged and, at home that evening, when asked what had gone on at school that day, they shrugged some more and said, “Nothing.” Kids are cool.

Not so dramatic, there is nonetheless between all students and their teachers a subtle exchange, not all of it intellectual. Of course. Everybody's sexual. The problem is that sex is not supposed to be addressed in the classroom. It's a no-no; teachers can get in trouble acknowledging it unless it occurs in literature—
Romeo and Juliet
is pretty safe because it's Shakespeare, and so is
The Scarlet Letter
because nobody actually reads it—and then the classroom discussion of what goes on in those books had better be short. Too bad, because the classroom is exactly the place to mount a serious, rational discussion of an inflammatory subject. Where else can kids learn to douse the flames of hyperemotionality with reason? It is said that adult society wants us (teachers) to teach kids to think. I have serious doubts about this, since adult society perpetuates all kinds of impendimenta to thinking (standardized testing comes to mind). One barrier in place long before I became a teacher and after I stopped being a teacher was the taboo against sex as a topic for discussion in the classroom. An unfortunate prohibition, because it's easier and faster and more effective to teach kids to think if they are interested in what we ask them to think about. Sex beats out isosceles triangles every time.

And of course, teachers are sexual persons, too; some of them are even sexy. I am remembering this cute-as-a-bug history teacher standing before her class eating an apple and drinking the coffee her TA has brought her. He stands just to her right, drinking coffee, too, his reward for having gone off campus to where the latte is. She looks over and winks, his other reward. She is wearing a gray University of California at Santa Barbara sweatshirt, which sets off her blond hair, Levi's that fit, boy do they, and Reeboks. She is darling. And she plays it for all it's worth. Her darlingness, her sexuality, if you will, is part of her teaching. Kids pay attention to her because they like to look at her, because she flirts with them and they with her. Somewhere amongst all this, history gets learned.

I am not immune. In my early days of high school teaching, I became enamored of an ass belonging to a sixteen-year-old named Ben Jones. I was so entranced, I would get to school early and hang out casually in the hall down which I knew Ben would pass on his way to first period. I tee-heed and tittered when Ben became a student in my class; he took advantage of me and handed in his homework late or not at all. He knew that I would forgive his absences because I would be so glad to see him (or his ass). He just had his way with me, though he still got a C.

I will pass quickly over the time I ordered a particularly shrill ninth-grade boy never to speak again “until your testicles drop.” He was silent until one fine spring day he entered the classroom and boomed, “Hi there, Mrs. Juska.” He had become a man. I didn't get fired for that; however, over the years, I got more subtle in my classroom management techniques. In my last years of teaching high school, I used my sex or, must I say, gender, the kids not believing that sex visited the human female after forty.
Eeeuw!
Sitting in my chair in the open part of the horseshoe, I would command quiet and the attention of every one of my all-too-many ninth-graders by looking at them, just looking at them, and then, since there was always one miscreant who remained unmesmerized by my hypnotic stare, I would say, “If you don't stop talking, I'm going to come over there and kiss you.” Then, if he (it was always a “he”) didn't shut up, I would rise from my chair, glorious in all my sixty years, and move toward him. Hands and arms crossed over his face as if to ward off the devil herself, the poor kid would promise never, ever to talk again. After that, all I had to do to bring order out of chaos was purse my lips.

Another gimmick they don't teach in education school is this: Look at the kid who's misbehaving and mouth the words “I love you.” Now, he probably won't see this because he is misbehaving flagrantly for the benefit of his buddies around him, but those sitting near him will see what I am saying and will punch him and poke him and roar with laughter at his expense. If the criminal is a girl, all I need to say is, “Will you get this class quiet?” and she will yell out something like “Shut the fuck up!” Everybody's quiet, thank you very much, let's learn something.

None of this works on juniors and seniors or if you, the teacher, are under fifty. The danger is that upperclassmen will respond to your threat to kiss them with “Hey, hey, hey, let's get it on!” I know; it happened. I underline this when I am with my teachers-to-be. “Wait till you get tenure,” I add.

Superior in wisdom and experience as you are, sometimes the kids will strike first. If, as a teacher, you see a kid poke or nudge his friend sitting next to him, you know something's about to happen, probably with you as the target. One morning, once everyone got quiet, this boy—I have repressed his name— said, no, wait, he raised his hand, which should have been my first clue—and said with all the sweetness of a snake, “Mrs. Juska, what was it like before fire?” I looked directly back at him and said, “Cold like your heart.” Pause. “And dark like your mind.” The friend jabbed the kid in the shoulder and chortled, “She got you, she got you.” It's great to be victorious over fourteen-year-olds.

In my graduate seminar, questions arise eventually about offering personal information. Kids are naturally curious about the person in front of them posing as a teacher, so isn't it okay to share? The answer is, if you do or don't, you must know why. Will your answer to “Are you married?” or “Do you have any kids?” help learning occur? Usually, the answer is no. But sometimes, every so often, you can make their curiosity and your personal life part of a classroom negotiation. For example, there's the elbow, the signal to Watch This, and the kid says to me, “Hey, Mrs. Juska, did you ever do drugs?”
Snicker, snicker.
Now, the answer, as you know, is yes; but the question is, will telling them a little story about my twenty-five years of drug-taking lead to learning? Maybe. So if I want to risk it, I say, “Yes, actually, I did. I started when I was about your age.” Oh, well, eyes pop, their attention is all mine, but no, no, I say, “We've got work to do; maybe, if it gets done quickly and well, I'll tell you the rest. We'll see.”
Scurry, scurry.
Sometimes I tell them about the amphetamines and the tranquilizers and the laws that came down on people like me in 1970 and what it was like when I woke up that first morning without a pill to pop. Sometimes I don't. But whatever I tell them comes from the question in the back of my mind: How can I use this to get them to learn? I am ruthless.