Professor X (12 page)

I've seen plenty of movies and TV shows in which young marrieds take possession of new houses. They always seem happy: filled with hope, brimming with plans, nervous in a good way, giggly. My own vision of things is darker. I think of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo finally buying that house in Connecticut after all those years renting—she, livid and thick of frame, and he, puffy with drink—and I think: it's a good thing the series is in its last season, for surely now these two weary middle-aged mortgagees will kill each other. John Payne and Maureen O'Hara in
Miracle on 34th Street
find Santa's cane in the new house, and I think that soon the misery will commence. Little Natalie Wood, up in her dormered bedroom, just might hear, at night, the sound of grown-ups arguing.

We took possession of our new house on a gray midwinter's afternoon. Our team of moving men trooped in and out of the front door with boxes and furniture, and if I squinted and looked at them a certain way it seemed they were actually moving us
out
of the house, not in, like one of those optical illusions where the spinning statue changes direction, and I found myself sort of relieved for a moment. But then, of course, reality would intrude, harsher than ever.

The house had seemed rather stately when we looked at it; now it just seemed dark. Gloomy. All the furniture from the Bavarian cottage didn't come close to filling the rooms. We would buy more, I thought, and then the parade of expenses began. I had budgeted for a new roof—even our tyro home inspector could see that we needed one of those—but in her inexperience she had missed an underlying problem, and I thus learned more than I ever wanted to, at an enormous cost, about the need to have one's soffits rebuilt, and the always-intriguing interplay between soffit and fascia.

When we owned the Bavarian cottage, I never gave a thought to the national economy. But now, I died a little death with each plunge in the stock market.

I pined hopelessly for the past.

The world seemed to be sinking into anarchy. I couldn't watch the World Trade Center stuff anymore. I felt deafened by the din of terror and misery.

I lay in bed at night and pondered what to do. There was so much to be done I didn't know where to begin. I lay with the lights on and studied the beautiful old wallpaper in the bedroom. It was a lovely pattern, bunches of pink and green and yellow stems on a somber ocher background. It was beautiful but it was very old, peeling and cracked in places. It would really have to be removed, and yet I had bought the house partly because of the beautiful old wallpaper, which I think sums up rather neatly the unfocused and contradictory quality of the decision.

In buying the house, we did find Norman Rockwell. But we had been overambitious. I had wanted hardwood floors and a foyer and an attic, and I got them, and all the expense that went along with them. I had needed life to fill my books; now I was in the grip of more life than I could possibly handle. For the first time in my life I worried about money. When I heard a strange gurgling in a pipe, I worried. When the refrigerator appeared to stop working, I opened the door fifteen times in an hour and felt the food, and I worried. I sat down and tried to write my way out of my worry and the pen hung poised above the page. I couldn't focus on anything. The milk in my coffee tasted a little sour. I worried, and I denied my worry to my wife because I didn't want her to worry. She tried to persuade me to be as worried as I actually was, and then we fought and both worried even more.

“If you're choosing between taking vacations and having a nice house, buy the house, because having a great house is like being on perpetual vacation.” I was in yet a third situation, a place the adage failed to mention: I certainly wouldn't be taking any vacations, and neither would I be in the house very much, because it was soon obvious that I would have to crank up my second income. Whatever the state of the wallpaper, it would stay up. The time had come to kick my second career as an adjunct professor of English into high gear.

 

Denouement.
I define it for my literature classes as the untying of the knot. Conflicts are resolved, the various plot strands untangle, the characters resume something akin to normal life, and the reader experiences catharsis, a release of tension and anxiety. I have a little trouble teaching this one because I'm not at all sure denouement actually exists.

A
NY RESENTMENT I MIGHT HAVE HAD about having to work a second job melted away. I couldn't worry about the toll it might take on my happiness or my closeness with my family or my aging body. I couldn't worry about not seeing the children. I needed to adjunct up a storm. Pembrook College had been after me for a while to take on more classes; I called them up and told them airily that my schedule had “cleared up.” They took care of me. But I needed more. My new goal was to teach classes fifty-two weeks a year.

Late that summer, I approached Huron State, a community college within reasonable commuting distance. They were interested. My experience at Pembrook made me an appealing candidate. I was interviewed by the chairman of the English department and a second teacher, two women who reminded me, in both round shape and apparel, of a pair of nuns who had just gotten the directive not to wear the habit anymore. The interview went well, except for a moment right near the end. It sounded like I had a pretty full schedule at Pembrook; why, they asked with just a trace of suspicion, did I want to teach even more?

You know how it is in job interviews: you can't admit to needing the salary, much less to having made a cataclysmic financial decision threatening to push you over the edge. I thought fast. Adjuncts, I had come to understand, lived on the fringes. These two gals would assume I was a nut; the idea was to present as the right sort of nut.

“I'm trying to save for the kids' college,” I said evenly, madly simplifying. “Trying to avoid loans.”

I had conveyed what I wanted. I was concerned with education. I was a hard worker, a beast of burden. I had perhaps a bit of the right-wing survivalist in me, a man who would prefer to pay college tuition, if not in gold coins, at least in cash. Strictly speaking, what I told them wasn't entirely untrue. I did have college tuition looming, and I did have an aversion to debt. There was no need to tell them how I got that aversion.

They hired me on the spot. And, since they always needed good English adjuncts, they'd appreciate, if I knew anybody. . . .

I walked out of the interview feeling not exactly buoyed but somewhat relieved. I strolled pensively around the lovely, peaceful campus. Several of the buildings were quite old, but most, according to their cornerstones, were built in the 1950s, of a dusty yellow brick that conveyed a businesslike feeling of solidity. Several wiry and hawklike old women, who I later learned belonged to a local garden club, tended the impressive flower beds. The sun shone beautifully off the ladies' white hair. They seemed so happy, their lives so well lived. The campus bookstore was open, and several clerks unpacked textbooks from cartons. I had a real sense of new beginnings. Of course, I remained a man in his forties, and this was no time for a new beginning. Our buying of the house coincided almost to the moment, unfortunately, with our first glimpses of retirement. I had never thought about retiring from my day job; my work life stretched before me, I thought, infinitely. But all of a sudden I was getting service pins and being treated as an elder statesman. Conversations with colleagues started to move down the same detour: “So when can you pack it in?” they would ask. Did I really look that old? I didn't tell them what I was feeling: that I had made quite sure that I would never be able to retire, thank you very much. I would not be living in a condo on a golf course. I would not be joining a garden club and tending the black-eyed Susans at the local college. No, I wasn't going to take the usual path. My current plan was to drop dead at my desk.

Huron State put me in an English 101 class. The class was larger than any I'd had at Pembrook, and the students were younger. Of my twenty-five enrollees, no more than two or three were classic middle-aged returning students. They, of course, sat in the front seats. Their books were stacked neatly before them; they hung on my every utterance. Everyone else was young, but as the class progressed I realized they weren't as young as I had initially thought. They were in their twenties, and already beaten down. They had not gone directly from high school to college. Their essays revealed that they had spent some time in the world, time enough for unexpected pregnancies and broken marriages and parental estrangement and substance abuse difficulties and, always, thrumming along in the background, the relentless pulse of the stifling dead-end job. One girl mentioned in her first essay that she worked in a local café and had sold me the cup of aged Sumatran I had bought before that first night's class.

I hadn't thought at all about the philosophy behind community colleges. I knew their tuition was low; I knew they would take anybody. I could rattle off the press release: that the mission of the community college was to make college available to those who might otherwise be shut out, and I supposed that to be a noble goal. I did not know that their advocates possessed the zeal of missionaries.

In 1998, the American Association of Community Colleges noted the following about its constituent schools:

It is all, in theory, wonderful: American egalitarianism at its best. We are happy believing that we can and should send everyone under the sun to college. This seems a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it, and some companies even assist with tuition costs. Government is all for it; there are lots of opportunities, for the truly needy, for financial aid. The media cheerleads for it: Oprah,
The View,
National Public Radio—try to imagine someone coming out against the idea of everyone in America going to college. To be opposed to such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. And now that we find ourselves stumbling through the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, the thinking is that community colleges are even more vital to the survival of our nation. “Community colleges are going to be an absolute catalyst to help people get back on their feet,” says United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a roundtable organized by Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming.
²
Bill Cosby tapes public-service announcements in Detroit in support of the Wayne County Community College District.
³
And Barack Obama pledges to spend $12 billion over the next decade on the American Graduation Initiative, which would, as the president said in a speech delivered at Macomb Community College in Michigan,

The American Graduation Initiative was removed from the 2009 Obama health care bill at the last moment, so for the moment it is a dead issue, but defeated or not, the language of the bill, the ringing optimism coupled with blind faith in the power of education, is striking. The American zeitgeist of limitless possibility is a beautiful thing to behold. I, too, want desperately to believe in it. But some of the students I encounter in the community college world test my belief in the ultimate workability, the sustainability (to use the fashionable term) of what we have set up.

The general preparation of my Huron State students turned out to be quite poor. I would have to figure out a way, and I wasn't at all sure I could, of reconciling the remedial work we were doing with a standard college curriculum. If you do ninth-grade work in a college classroom, does it automatically become college work? This is, I suppose, the ultimate question.