Why Teach? - chapter 13

There was snow on the ground outside Wonder’s, and particolored Christmas lights inside rimming the big plate glass windows.

There was snow on the ground outside Wonder’s, and particolored Christmas lights rimming the big plate glass windows inside. I was reading the copy of Emma I had borrowed from my grandmother’s a month before, a cup of coffee and a buttered cinnamon twist on the table before me.

“I bet there’s not another man within a hundred and fifty miles reading Austen right now,” a voice said.

I closed the book and laid my hand over its cover as if to protect the author’s ears. “Only a hundred and fifty?”

“Maybe farther.”

I looked up and saw the face of a woman who looked to be in her early twenties. She had shoulder-lengthed hair and was wearing a long, open camelhair coat with a cream-colored sweater. Her eyebrows rose as if in anticipation of a penny dropping, but on my end, the coin wouldn’t fall. I recognized her, but couldn’t tell from where.

“I’ll give you a minute.”

I scrutinized her, shook my head. “I’m not sure that’s going to do it.”

“My brother would be disappointed.” She tilted her head. “Or, maybe not.”

Then I had her—partially. “Matthew…”

Appliance-whitened teeth flashed between red-lipsticked lips. “That’s his name.”

“You’ll be working for my father?”

“That’s not my name.”

“Pomerantz.”

“Closer…”

“Kelsey. I’m not sure we’ve ever been properly introduced.” I stood and held out my hand, but she leaned in past it, hugging me briefly like an old friend before stepping backward.

“I don’t think that’s true. It’s just been eight or ten years.”

“I might have been a senior,” I suggested.

“You were a senior.” Her lips parted to reintroduce her dazzling white teeth.

She had me flat-footed, and I wasn’t sure what to do with the flirtation I heard in her voice. There was something in the intensity of her gaze, too, that was almost gleeful, as if she’d told a joke a few moments ago and was still waiting for me to catch up and get it so we could both start laughing. I found something in my chest leaping up to respond to her in an almost animalistic way. “You’re in town for Christmas?”

“All the way through New Years.”

“You’ll have to give me your number so I can show you around.”

Some of the laughter that had been threatening spilled over. “I grew up here.”

“You still seem like someone who needs the guided tour.” I handed her my phone.

She was obliged to spend some time with her parents in the next couple nights, but suggested I might see her the evening of the 23rd. A bunch of people were getting together at the Brush Bar, on the first floor of the country club. I could meet her there.

“I’m going to be out at my dad’s, anyway. I’ll see you then,” I said.

The girl working the counter called out Kelsey’s name. “I’ll look forward to it,” she said.

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I packed a few things into a duffel bag that afternoon and drove out to my father’s to let his dogs out and begin my stay housesitting.

Without being gaudy or ostentatious, the house my father had built on the rise at the end of Cottonwood Lane was widely considered to be among the most enviable on the country club’s grounds. It overlooked the fourth hole’s putting green to the south, and its elevation afforded it a better view of the course than any other dwelling ringing the greens. To the east, it boasted an unobstructed view of the Hackshaw Buffalo Preserve. Most mornings, at least some part of the herd was within view of his bedroom window. These qualities were nice, but the thing I found most appealing about my father’s house in my first hours there was that it was quiet. After I’d finished my breakfast of steel-cut oats from his pantry and sausage patties and fresh berries from his refrigerator, I couldn’t tell if it was the absence of the usual noise of my apartment or being free of my usual obligations and routines that gave me ability to think. And when I did think, I thought that this was perhaps a life that could be mine, quiet enough to allow for thought, with high ceilings and comfortable furniture and views of a putting green, a pond, a tin windmill, and a buffalo herd. I had, growing up, told myself a thousand times that I didn’t need money like my father’s to be happy. Drinking a cup of coffee I had made in his Italian coffee maker from a bag of beans he had mail-ordered in, padding around half-dressed in my father’s comfortable home despite the low-twenties temperature outside, I found myself reluctantly admitting that only someone who’d had it so good as I had growing up could have made such a claim.

I let the dogs out, let them back in, refreshed their food and water, and then Harold and Winston settled into their beds on either side of my father’s favorite chair. I spent some time looking over my father’s books, and finally made my way to his home office, the desk of which he kept immaculately desolate, to begin my work.

A number of things had become clear to me after my trip to Wichita and subsequent weeks of teaching Emerson, Thoreau, and the American Romantics. One of them was that I had, at some point in the previous three years, stopped actively pursuing my own life—that I had taken the car out of drive, shifted it into neutral, and coasted to a near-stop. Another was that I had allowed myself, perhaps as some kind of protective or defensive mechanism, to become entirely too invested in my teaching. Focusing on the daily problems of my classroom and the bigger-picture issues with the administration had distracted me from what I should have been worried about: my future. After I recognized these problems, the correct course of action to amend the situation became immediately clear: I needed to send off applications to continue my education. That I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted to apply to law school or a graduate program in English I now recognized as a barrier that needn’t have been as significant as I had let it become. I could apply to both, a handful of each, and make my decision in a few months based on what responses I received.

So I passed my morning outlining essays and drafting responses to short-answer questions, phoned-in and picked-up an order for lunch from the clubhouse’s kitchen, and wrote the first drafts of several of the essays my applications required after eating my Jalapeño burger, fries, and pickle spear. Writing essays had never been a weakness for me—I had always earned good grades for my writing—but writing had always been painful, a late-night process. In high school and college, I had agonized over my authorial choices. Now, three-and-a-half-years of teaching behind me, I had an answer for every dilemma that arose, and a workaround for each roadblock. I worked quickly and methodically, dispatching four solid drafts before the time came for dinner. I grilled one of the steaks my father had left for me and watched part of a college basketball tournament on my father’s satellite to pass the evening. At eleven, after I had let the dogs out and back in again, I finished two more chapters of Emma and went to bed.

The next day I was more productive in the morning and less-so in the afternoon. I walked the dogs after lunch and then fell to napping. After my dinner I thought that sitting down to look over the work I had done during the day might put me in a better place to improve my writing the next morning, and looking over a few of my essays turned into typing a few more paragraphs, and at the end of an hour I was so deeply in a groove I worried that if I climbed out to go meet Kelsey Pomerantz at the Brush Bar I wouldn’t be able to climb back in. Surely she hadn’t really been interested in meeting me—surely her invitation was merely polite. I had said I would go, though, and she would be working with my father in the summer. Much as I didn’t think I should be, I felt constrained by filial obligations. Thinking I might have a drink and put in an hour’s face time before coming back home, I saved my files and stood to dress and go out.

At the clubhouse I found a tableau I had once been intimately familiar with: twenty or thirty well-to-do graduates of PCHS dressed in their preppie best back for Christmas break charging drinks on their parents’ club accounts. There was a quality of déjà vu about the display, made strange by the fact I only vaguely recognized anyone participating. The oldest of those I saw spread out before me had probably been sophomores when I graduated. I spotted Kelsey from the point where I had stopped beside the coat rack inside the bar’s double doors, and her attitude, laughing between two of the tallest and preppiest-looking young men in the room, seemed to confirm the suspicion I’d had forty-five minutes before: that she had been merely being polite when she saw me at Wonder’s, and that my presence here was entirely unnecessary. The fact that I was too old for the crowd became pointedly clear before I had pulled my arms from my jacket’s sleeves, and I was in the process of shrugging it back on when the taller of Kelsey’s tall suiters called out “Hey, Danny Zuko,” across the bar. Partially because of the half-jacketed pose I was in, but also because of a dance routine I had participated in during a pep assembly my senior year, I knew he was speaking to me.

Kelsey was motioning for me when I looked back up, and, after a moment’s hesitation, I reversed my action, stripping off my jacket to hang it with the others.

“I wasn’t sure you were going to make it,” Kelsey said after I’d joined them.

“Beer you?” asked the guy who had called me ‘Zuko.’

I said Sure, and told them I could stick around for one. The name “Layton” sprang into my mind. I remembered him, vaguely, as a freshman football running back who had played up to JV. His father was a dentist, or orthodontist. One of the ones no one in my family went to. He held his finger up for the bartender, and I could see that by this gesture he meant to show both his magnanimity and indifference to me—that he was working his charms on Kelsey Pomerantz and felt he had things pretty well locked-up. By the way their bodies were oriented, forming a sharp angle that only just allowed my own entrance into their conversation, it looked as if the two of them passing the rest of the night together might be a foregone conclusion.

“Just one?” Kelsey asked, turning toward me.

“I’m an old man now. I’ve only got room for one. I need to get home soon to watch some TV and go to bed.”

I meant this only to signal my lack of intention—to extricate myself from the bar gracefully—but Kelsey seemed to take my exit plan up as an invitation. “Watch TV? That’s what I need to do. Should we leave in, what, maybe an hour?”

Our drinks showed up and Layton signed for them, pivoting to set mine down in front of me more firmly than was necessary. Over the course of the next half hour, the smaller points of light around us, those shining down on bottles and glinting off the edges of our glassware, took on warmer and fuzzier glows as the bar became more crowded and the space between Kelsey and I narrowed. “Should we get out of here?” she asked sooner than I had expected.

“And go where?”

She squeezed my arm and looked up at me in a simpering kind of way. “Your place, silly. To watch television.”

I agreed that we should. The glance I caught from Layton on the way out made me think I would do well to avoid bumping into him anywhere else for the rest of the break.

Outside, the constellation of warm, fuzzy brightnesses within the Brush Bar seemed to have broken free of the bar’s confines and been mapped onto its outside: landscaping lights shining up on the clubhouse, headlights of other arriving and departing cars, dash lights in my own car, illuminated windows of the condos that we passed.

“Shoes off?” Kelsey asked inside my father’s front door, and “Do these seats recline?” after she had taken a seat on the sectional couch in the basement.

“It might take me awhile to figure this out,” I said, gesturing toward the trio of remotes lined up on the coffee table.

“That’s okay,” she said, pulling down the blanket draped over the couch’s back. “Come over and do it from here.”

Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist and educator. His novel Why Teach? is currently being serialized on Substack and will be published in early 2025. If you would like to support him, please consider ‘liking,’ ‘commenting, ‘subscribing,’ or buying him a coffee!