How often do you scream at the top of your lungs just because you want to? That's why I love the space inside my car, even if I do get caught looking insane sometimes. Because you know what? I'm in a car. I can just drive away and laugh.
I need to go to bed. My neck hurts and I'm tired and I may be getting sick. I hope not. I'm going to drive to Portland this weekend to visit my friend C.W. and I can't wait. I love her to death, and I find myself really craving being around people who love me right now. It's something. You walk into a room, people brighten up, smile at you, are thankful you're there and that you were born and that you're in their life. I don't have that here at Stanford, really. It makes me sad. I'm working on it. I'm working on spending time with people I think could be Good Friends, and maybe even Really Great Friends. I guess there's no getting around it. I want those friendships now, right this instant, fully formed and fat and complex and nice. Doesn't work that way.
I read in The Tao of Pooh today about following the Nature of Things. It's funny. Square pegs don't fit in round holes. A revelation, right? Really, though... how much time do I spend trying to shove square pegs in round holes, then coming up with Clever Ideas to try and really trick that square peg into being round, when instead I should have used all that energy walking around, looking up at the trees, smelling flowers, touching water, and—oh, hey, a round hole. It fits.
Astronaut
I pull Allan by his spindly rubber arms toward the front office and the principal.
“I’m failing you,” I say.
“Aw, come on Mr. Seitz. I didn’t do nothing.”
“Anything. Stop dragging your feet.”
“I’m not going to do nothing either.”
“I realize that.”
“You know,” Allan says. He plants his feet on the precisely white hallway tiles. His shoes slide as I pull and long black marks spill out behind his sneakers. “I really didn’t do nothing. Anything. You never see anything when it happens.”
“Then who?”
Allan pulls at the front of his shirt. “I’ve seen girls throw good sometimes. Rochelle throws harder than me.”
I untuck my shirt and lift up the back and show Allan the welt slowly waxing above my pant line. “This hard?”
He could not hold back a snigger. “That look like it hurt.”
“Rochelle.”
“Shit, I don’t know.”
“Come on.”
But just as I start to pull again, and as Allan begins to protest, I hear fast heals stamping down the hallway carrying a woman’s voice. “Mr. Seitz,” I hear. I turn and it is Maria Soto. I know instantly, even though she is at least fifteen years older than the last time I saw her. “Mr. Seitz,” she says. “Do you remember me?”
She is wearing a yellow, unironed summer dress and pearls and the most delicately infuriated expression. I had failed Maria when she was in eighth grade because she always watched the boys with their soft mustaches instead of listening to me. Allan squirms under my intensifying grip. “Who’s that?” he says.
“Maria Soto, of course. And?” I search for something innocuous. “And how is the family?”
“Mr. Seitz,” she begins. Her eyes finally settle into hard little shells, and I notice she is ever so slightly choking the life out of one of the crooked pleats on her dress. “I’m a civil engineer.”
“Please, you can call me Greg now. An engineer you said?”
She nods, her lips drawn.
Allan announces proudly, “I could be a engineer.”
“Well good. That’s fantastic Maria.”
“Yes, it is.”
I cannot read her face—it is impassive, yet filled with something that seems to have been boiling under a heavy lid for a long time. “You came all the way here to share the good news?”
“Do you remember what you said to me? Before Christmas break—you had me there, just like that.” She gestures toward Allan.
I do remember what I said. “No, I don’t,” I say, “but it must have left a good impression. An engineer, wow!” She does not speak, so I fill the air by saying, “You couldn’t stop ogling those boys.” I laugh at myself. “I always knew how you would turn out, though. A good mind.” What I said to Maria Soto when she was thirteen years old was that she was not even cut out to be a trophy wife.
“I live in a big house now,” Maria says. “I have a husband.”
“That’s great,” I say.
“I have two beautiful children.”
“Yes.”
“And I make six figures.”
Allan squirms again and I loosen my grip. I happen to glance at Maria’s legs. They are tan and strong and strapped with black heels. Without the heels, though, I can almost imagine that it is still thirteen-year-old Maria’s legs poking out the bottom of the wrinkly yellow cotton. “Is that all?” I say.
Her face does not look satisfied, but whatever was boiling there seems to have subsided. She lets her pleats breath again, nods her head yes, and turns to leave. I go to where Allan’s shoes had scuffed the immaculate floor, bend down, and try rubbing them out with my handkerchief.
Allan stands there over me, finally loosed from my hold on his arm, looking strangely exposed without a teacher or a hall pass at his side. He watches Maria walk briskly down the hallway and around the corner, out of sight, in awe.
“I never liked a white girl before,” he says.
I rub half of the first mark out of the floor and sit back on my haunches. “Think you can take yourself to the office?”
Allan wakens from his daydream and looks at me. “They won’t stop me?” He tugs at the front of his shirt and then says, “Alright,” and leaves.
I think about Maria as I try to rub the scuffs out of the tile. I can feel the welt still steadily rising under my shirt. Someone had gone to the trouble of throwing a rock at me. They had to take it in from the outside, which meant it was premeditated, unless Allan always carries around rocks. Or maybe it was Rochelle. After a while the bell rings for the end of third period, and I realize I left my students alone for the last twenty minutes of class. By then the scuffs are mostly gone, and as the kids flood the hallway I try to discretely dry my armpits with the handkerchief.
I head for the safety of the teacher’s lounge and fill my thermos with coffee. I climb up the break room counter because someone, I do not know who, always hides the coffee creamer on the top shelf. I reach it, and as I do Cheryl Kravitz and Shep Grossman walk in laughing. Since the beginning of the year I have tried to glean from the other teachers whether or not they are having an affair. She is wearing her blue-and-white, polka-dotted blouse today and the jeans I always thought made her butt look less full than I often imagined it was. They see me taking a knee on the counter, my foot tucked under my bottom, and laugh more.
“Again with the creamer, Gordon?” says Cheryl.
I get down from the counter and add the creamer to the coffee in my thermos. “It’s some asshole that keeps doing it,” I say. This makes Shep grin.
Cheryl says, “If you drank it black you wouldn’t need creamer.”
“What were you guys laughing about?”
“I always drink mine black,” says Shep. “The kids can smell a teacher who doesn’t.”
I keep looking at Cheryl, waiting for her to rescue me from feeling like an idiot.
“It was nothing,” she says finally. “That little brat Allan was giving Shep trouble in first period again.”
“He threw rocks?”
“Jesus,” says Shep, grinning wider still. “They’re throwing rocks at you now?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure if it was him.”
“I saw Allan in the principal’s office,” says Cheryl. “You sent him?”
“Just now.”
“And you don’t know if it was him?”
“I guess not.”
Shep’s laughing now. He takes the coffee creamer from me and puts it back on the top shelf. He does not have to reach—he is tall and lean and always has on the same athletic shoes the kids wear. “Rocks, Gordon? Really?”
“You’re the one who puts it there?”
Shep shrugs and then thumbs my belly. “Just looking out for you, Mr. Seitz.”
I do a thought experiment where I imagine what it would be like to grab a fistful of Shep’s hay-like hair and throw his head against the cracked yellow linoleum counter. The brutality and clarity of the thought surprises me. Then my mind flashes with images of Cheryl’s blue-and-white, polka-dotted blouse slipping down her shoulders and gathering around her hips like rumpled paper.
“I should get going,” I say.
“You’re going to pub night tonight?” Cheryl says.
Shep’s face seems to be stuck in a permanent grin and I say, “Not tonight, no.”
Cheryl looks at me and for a second I imagine that in the room there are only us two. “That’s too bad,” she says.
On my way to my favorite bench outside I run into Allan, who has just left the principal’s office. I decide to ignore him, but then change my mind. “Was it bad?” I say.
Allan eyes me and is silent for a few moments. “They called my mom. She’s coming right now.”
I take a sip of my creamed coffee and then look down into my thermos. “What did you say to them?”
“The same as I told you. This time, it wasn’t me. This time I didn’t throw nothing.”
“They believe you?”
“What do you think?”
I nod down at my coffee. I never thought I would end up anything like Ms. Rifkin. When I was in eighth grade she liked to list for me all of the ways in which I would fail. Like, for instance, how I would never become an astronaut. Most kids had outgrown their idolization of astronauts by the time they left elementary school, but not me. Thinking about it now, I was enamored to the word more than anything else. Astro, as in the stars and the universe, and the blackness you see at night only when you are deep enough in the wilderness. Naut, like nautical, like the sea and its captain. If you were an astronaut, it meant you were the captain of the universe, it meant you could control space with a box of buttons and a port hole. It meant you could sail solar winds.
I glance back over my shoulder. “How would you like to go into the teacher’s lounge?”
Allan looks around me and then pulls at the front of his loose shirt. “They got vending machines, huh.”
I pull four glimmering quarters from my pocket and place them in the palm of Allan’s hand. “I’m addicted to root beer,” I say. Allan follows me to the break room, and by the time we get there Cheryl and Shep are long gone, and Allan and I share a soda as we wait for the arrival of his mother.
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