Why Teach? - chapter 4

I circled the town on the bypass that Friday night, texting Garret from the long stoplight by the Route 50 Truck Stop to see about swinging by.

I circled the town on the bypass that Friday night, texting Garret from the long stoplight by the Route 50 Truck Stop to see about swinging by. “Door’s open,” he texted back, so I switched on my turn signal and wheeled back into town.

Of the many ways Plains City is divided, one of the most easily recognizable is “the hill.” More of a low plateau, really, the hill rises, zig-zag fashion, diagonally across the town, splitting it roughly between older and newer, poorer and richer, more darkly pigmented and more light. There are exceptions to this rule of the hill, of course. Older and more affluent neighborhoods exist at the lower elevation (where I, when my parents were still married, lived in my youth), and there are some more impoverished areas and poorly-built apartments up high. But the better elementary schools and real estate are generally understood to be “on the hill,” and the lesser down low, and as Plains Citians talk, the rule generally abides. Garret’s place was on the hill, at the less desirable end of a long, desirable street, in an unattractive little square of duplexes facing in toward an unkempt square of grass. Kemper’s, an on-the-hill sports bar, was two-blocks away. I thought after meeting at his place he and I might head over to pass a couple hours there before I went home.

“Come on in, water’s fine!” he called from his recliner as I let myself in the front door. He was typing something on his phone as he spoke and didn’t look up at me at first. When he did, it was with a toothy grin. “Hot enough for ya? Grab a beer if’n you want one.”

I did, and took a seat on his couch when I came back from his fridge. Watching him teach PE, coach baseball, go out to Kemper’s or the Oasis a few times a week, and run through a revolving list of girls’ numbers on his phone, sometimes I wondered why I couldn’t simply adjust to life in Plains City like Garret. We watched a rerun Harrison Ford movie on his television until the first commercial break arrived and he looked across the room at me.

“You hear about the new teacher?” he asked.

“The math guy?”

Unable to control his students’ behaviors, a first-year in the math department had simply walked out of his classroom the week before, driving his truck to the apartment he had rented at the beginning of August, packing up his things, and leaving town. His classroom had been without an instructor for the rest of the day, and none of the principals had known anything about it until he’d called the central office the next morning to resign.

“The math guy’s old news. I’m talking about the gal in Science. The tiny one? On Wednesday.”

I told him I hadn’t heard.

“You know. She was from out of the country. From Malaysia or Polynesia or someplace. She called a group of pregnant girls in the back of her room a bunch of sluts.”

“She said sluts? How many girls?”

He shrugged. Above him, the shadow thrown by the glow of his cell phone grew and receded on the ceiling as his hand moved back over it. “Two or three. Maybe four. It was a junior-level class, so there could’ve been any number. That’s not the worst of it, though. Guess what she said when they tried to give her some lip?”

“No thank you? Quiet please?”

He shook his head. “Told them to shut up. To shut the fuck up.”

“To shut the fuck up,” I repeated.

He waved his hand. “Something like that. But she definitely dropped the f-bomb from what I heard.”

“Do you think she knew? I mean, do you think she understood how inappropriate that was?”

His phone lit up, and he checked his message before turning back to face me. “See, that’s the thing. I don’t think anyone knows. English was like, either her second or third language, and who can tell if she gets our culture?”

I thought about how many times a person might hear the words ‘slut’ or ‘fuck’ walking through the lunch room at PCHS. “She must’ve heard the kids say it all the time.”

His phone lit back up, and he typed another message. He turned back to me. “See, that’s on the admins. You’re going to go out of the country to hire teachers who don’t speak English, you’ve gotta know you’ll have to train them. Fuckers come in from places where the kids squat and write on chalkboards all day long. Where kids think it’s a privilege to learn. How are they supposed to know what to do in an American classroom?” His phone lit up again.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

He ignored my question, and the television commercial break ended. We watched another eight or ten minutes of the movie, and the next commercial break came on. Garret looked down to check his phone, started typing. “Anything new going on with you?” he asked idly.

“I got written up this week.”

He didn’t look up. “Where’d you touch her?”

“I don’t touch anyone anywhere but their minds and hearts. It was actually about this no books thing.”

“Hmm,” he said, fingers still moving.

“It’s surprising, isn’t it? I mean, it’s books. I teach English. What would you do if they took away your basketballs and jump ropes?”

Garret only afforded this hypothetical a moment’s attention. “Run ‘em more and do more push-ups. Not too hard to jump without a rope.”

“It might not be quite so easy to stretch kids’ brains as their muscles.”

“Y’all in English might just not be as good of teachers as we are in PE.”

“Don’t you think it’s at least pretty racist?”

The movie came back on. Faintly annoyed, he shot me a glance. “Racist? I think you guys over in English are butt-hurt because they took away your toys. I read those books in school. Fuck if I know what good they did me.”

“We’re a minority-majority school and they’re asking us to deliver an education that’s less than the educations kids get in other schools in the state. Can you imagine what would happen if they tried to ban books in a majority white school on the east end of the state?”

“We’re not teaching a bunch of white kids on the east side of the state. We’re teaching a bunch of wetbacks out west.”

I let the conversation go, stood to grab another beer from his fridge. “You want to go to Kemper’s after this,” I asked when I got back.

He shook his head, lifted his phone. “I’ve got some action lined up.”

“Is she legal?”

“Nope.”

It was hard to tell whether he was serious or not. “Nobody I have in class, I hope.”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch. She’s twenty.”

“Anybody I had in class?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t have you. Her friend did. Want me to invite her?”

I said No, but Garret was already tapping on his phone.

“Her friend thought you were cute. You want me to try?”

I said No again, but he was still tapping. Looking back up, finally, he laughed.

“They’re already feeling good,” he said. “She’s in.”

I started to stand. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t even want to know who it is?” He pointed toward his kitchen. “I’ve got a case of beer in there that says the four of us could have a pretty good time.”

I shook my head. “When’re they going to get here? I’ll clear out.”

“’Bout half an hour. You used to be a lot more fun.”

* * *

The parking lot behind the Douglas Building was full when I got home, and I could hear music echoing down from open windows on the top floor when I left my car in the lot across the street. A community college party.

I walked in through the building’s rear entrance, called the elevator, and stood beside the mailbox bank waiting for it to come down. As it did, I heard two voices through its doors. “—gonna fucking do something, though,” said the first.

“He’s a little bitch, anyway,” said the other.

“Gonna fucking do some shit, though.”

“Gabe, though—that guy’s fucking crazy.”

When the doors opened, I recognized the voices’ owners: Frank Weber and Eric Terriquez. I had seen the former in my classroom some nine or ten hours before, and would see the latter, if he ever chose to show back up, in my fourth-hour class. Frank opened his mouth to talk, then didn’t. Eric just stood there.   

“Weird, right?” I said. “You never know who you’re going to run into outside an elevator.”

“Sorry Able,” said Eric.

“Yeah, sorry,” said the other.

Their backs to the wall, they slid out of the elevator, as if giving me wide berth might keep me from smelling the alcohol on their breaths and cigarette smoke on their persons. And then they were out of the building, the glass door swinging shut behind them.

“Be your best selves,” I called after them, but I wasn’t sure if they could hear me. The elevator doors were already closing, and then the cables and pulleys were carrying me up to the fourth floor.

* * *

In my apartment, the thumping of music and noise of hallway footraces coming through the ceiling above me, the recent events of the week shifted back and forth and became muddled in my mind. I recognized that the thing to do was take a shower, read a chapter of the book I was working on, and go to bed. A night of sleep would do me good. I would be able to see things more clearly in the morning.

Walking into my room to retrieve my book from the night stand, though, I was surprised to find my sheets and blanket missing. My immediate, ridiculous thought was of the community college students: that some of them had made rounds breaking into apartments in the building to steal people’s bedclothes for some kind of impromptu toga party they must be having.

But my bedding was in the washer down the hall, of course. I had put it there after school as I did every Friday afternoon and then forgotten to move it to the dryer before driving over to Garret’s. I had another set of sheets and another blanket, but the sheets were dirty, balled up at the bottom of my hamper. I couldn’t use them unless they were both washed and dried. I would have to stretch the night out further, another forty-five or fifty minutes at least, reading in the laundry room as I waited on the dryer. Two more chapters of my book, then.

Leaving my apartment with a static sheet and handful of quarters, I found the hallway vacant, the laundry room unoccupied. I switched my load, pushed my dollar into the dryer’s slots, and sat down in one of the chairs beside the folding table to start reading.

Try as I might, I couldn’t involve myself in the book. I was in the last third of Conrad’s Lord Jim, where the tone had shifted, and the events on Patusan, where the previously disgraced Jim became a kind of judicial guide to the native people, seemed too romantic and too far removed to follow naturally from the book’s starting-out. Setting it down, I fell again to trying to sort out the events of my week. I thought of Mrs. Hirsche, my father, and Garret, and it occurred to me that my making any of them happy would result in my own unhappiness; that I wasn’t sure, at this particular juncture in my life, what I could do to make my own happiness come about. I was working over this dilemma when I sensed movement and was surprised by the appearance of Adrienne Gallegos in the laundry room’s doorway when I looked up.    

“Fuck,” she said.

I, too, was unsettled. Adrienne had a pink pass in one of her hands, and her sharp eyebrows were raised in alarm. For a moment, I didn’t understand what she was doing in my building’s laundry room so late at night, or why she should have a pink pass at all. Was she an office aide? Was I supposed to have a student with me who was now needed somewhere else, or did someone need me? Was Adrienne in the wrong place, or was I? And what was the protocol for correcting a swearing student aide who had brought a pink pass to the wrong room on a Friday night?

“Shit,” she said as her mind caught up with the first word that had come out of her mouth. Her free hand came up and clamped itself over her lips.

My mind was catching up, too. As her empty hand rose, I saw that the flash of pink in her other wasn’t a pass, but a Jack Daniels wine cooler. Adrienne wasn’t in the room to find me or deliver a pass; she was out drinking with her friends at one of the parties upstairs and had had a bad time of it somehow. She had stumbled into the laundry room while looking for refuge. To run into me, her first-block English teacher, was mortifying: the shit-frosting atop the shit-cake of a hard night.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, tears gathering on her lashes. “We do laundry for the bakery here. I thought—” but she couldn’t tell me what it was she thought. Her face tied itself into a knot it would need time and several tearful spasms to untie itself from. “You can tell my mom,” she said at last. “It’s fine.”

The memory of her mother swinging marionette-like in the arms of her mustachioed boyfriend the night of Bryce’s funeral flashed across my mind. Would her mother even be sober enough to receive such a call this late on a Friday night? “If you need a ride, I think your mom would appreciate it more if the call came from you,” I said. “Or maybe you have another safe ride?” I pointed at the bottle in her hand. “Somebody just handed that to you to hold onto for a second,” I suggested. “You should probably throw it away.” There was a trash can in the room, but it was beside me, and she didn’t want to cross to my side of the room to get to it. This seemed wise. I didn’t want her to cross to my side of the room, either. “Or you can just set it up there,” I said, gesturing to the shelf above the coin exchanger beside the door.

Adrienne set the bottle there and, like a student with more questions to ask after the bell, lingered. She was a strong student, I reflected. Probably strong enough to be in an ‘honors’ section instead of my regular ‘jock’ one. Besides Adrienne, only two or three of the other students really seemed to have true academic interest. At once, I felt sorry I hadn’t been able to elevate the level of discourse in our classroom further for her, and resolved to make a recommendation to the counselors that she be in honors for her for senior year.

“Everyone who you don’t think drinks really drinks all the time,” she said. “Jenna Curtis is drunk upstairs. Elaina Delacruz is beyond gone.”

Elaina Delacruz was the vice president of the senior class. “I don’t know who Jenna Curtis is,” I said.

“She’s the sophomore on the cheerleading team. The littlest one.”

The girl they threw into the air—the one from the top of the cheerleader’s pyramids. Jenna was maybe five feet tall and probably weighed eighty-five pounds.

“Nick Hamilton smokes weed. Dwight Carroll and Keith Durham do too. They’re all up there getting stoned.”

I had Nick and Keith in class—neither of these facts surprised me. Nick’s habit was probably innocent enough, but Keith might be on his way to bigger problems. “I don’t know Dwight, either.”

“He debates with Holly Steinmetz.”

“Holly isn’t up there, is she?” Holly Steinmetz was in one of Mrs. Rosenbaum’s honors sections—she was one of the best students in the school.

Adrienne looked up out of her daze as if she wondered if I knew anything at all. “Holly? No. She wouldn’t be up there. Some of the other senior girls, though. They’re rolling on ecstasy.”

I didn’t ask which girls she was talking about, and hoped she wouldn’t tell me. “I heard that was becoming a thing.” There had been some mushrooms for a while when I’d been a student, but I hadn’t known anyone who did anything like ecstasy. It had mostly just been alcohol and pot when I was coming up.

“Everyone was smoking. They had a gas mask, Keith and those guys. Like from World War II.” She held up her hands to demonstrate the mask’s surprising proportions. “They set it up so they could smoke with it. Everyone was taking turns wearing it in one of the bedrooms. Then Jenna put it on and started running around and sneaking up on people. And then she was just standing there in the middle of the living room and they were lighting the snorkel thing and smoke was filling the eye holes.”

I imagined the smallest cheerleader standing atop a pyramid in the middle of the gym wearing an anteater-style gas mask, smoke seeping out around its edges. “Sounds unsettling.”

“It was. It was—” Her gaze became unfixed and she couldn’t seem to find the word she was looking for. “It seemed unreal. I only wore it for a minute. Everyone said ‘Adrienne, you have to,’ and ‘we have to get Adrienne to do it,’ so I did. They only shotgunned me once. Then I started coughing really bad and they had to take it off. And then I threw up on the carpet. Everyone was laughing. Then one of the guys who lives there was yelling at me, like ‘you have to get the ‘eff out of here,’ and I wanted to leave but Camilla and Renee wanted to stay, and so—”

“So you came down here to the laundry room and found your English teacher waiting on his dryer.”

“And then that.” A few of the tears that had been brimming began to roll down her face, now.

In class, I would have handed her a tissue or offered her a pass to the counselors, but here neither option was available to me. “Renee Prescott?” I asked, instead.

She nodded and I felt myself wince. Renee Prescott wasn’t the kind of girl I would have expected Adrienne Gallegos to pass her time with.

“Are you okay now?”

“Some of the senior girls do cocaine,” she said, probably more for the sake of her own processing than for me to understand.

“Don’t do cocaine.”

She regarded me again as if I didn’t understand anything. Since I hadn’t said “don’t do” with respect to anything else, had I tacitly given her permission to drink, smoke weed, and pop ecstasy?

“I’m not planning to.” There was indignation in her voice, as if I hadn’t been paying attention as she’d been speaking; as if I’d somehow forgotten who she was.

I cocked an eyebrow as if she’d forgotten who I was.

“I won’t do cocaine,” she said.

The power going into the dryer cut out and it spun to a stop. In the room’s new silence we could hear the thump of music from above. Standing, I retrieved my basket from the top of the bank of dryers, opened my own machine’s door, and began gathering my sheets. “Do you have a safe ride to get home?”

Her hand touched her front pocket where the outline of her phone stood out. “I can get one.”

“Don’t be afraid to call your parents if you need to.” I hefted my basket.

“If I need to,” she agreed.

“And if you need anything, my apartment’s at the far end of the hall.” I pointed toward my corner of the building. “It’s the last one on the left.”

She backed through the doorway to make way for me as I approached. “You’re not going to tell my mom?”

“Not unless you want me to,” I said as I squeezed past her. Then, over my shoulder: “Be your best self.”

* * *

Back in my apartment, I thought about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not his novel The Scarlet Letter, but a short story he wrote called “Young Goodman Brown.” In the tale, the young, “good man” stepped out of his house one evening despite the protests of his wife to join his outwardly virtuous neighbors in a night of sinful revel. How similar had Adrienne’s experience of the evening been to the experience of the story’s title character? How eerily similar was her experience to the experience I’d had in high school?

My mind went to what she’d said about Jenna Curtis. What was the best word to describe the image of the tiniest cheerleader in a powder blue and white outfit wearing a gas mask during a halftime show? Was it “grotesque” or “surreal”? Was there a better word to describe the incongruity? Beyond the image of the diminutive cheerleader, what could be done with the mental picture of Adrienne, perhaps the most promising student in her class, sitting in a classroom desk with her pencils, pens, paper and notebooks arrayed before her and a rubber gas mask obscuring her face? There had been days this semester when every other student but her in the class had missed the joke—she’d sometimes been so astute it felt as if there was a second adult in the room.

I opened the copy of the junior-level textbook I kept at home and leafed toward the story. What I couldn’t wrap my head around was the duality of the lives people live. I didn’t understand how Adrienne, who I could always count on to do the reading, who wrote near-flawlessly, could pass her Saturday nights with Keith Durham, who lit firecrackers in the lunch room and read at a fifth-grade level, or Renee Prescott, who, if the rumors were true, had blown three members of the boys soccer team on a bus trip back from Hutchinson after the second match of this year’s season. And I didn’t have trouble coming up with analogous situations from my own teenage experience. How many disparities between what I had expected and what had taken place had I known? Good people behaved in ways that were out of character all the time. Hadn’t Mrs. Cates, my tenth-grade English instructor, the woman who taught me To Kill a Mockingbird, been caught giving a blow job to Associate Principal Fredericks my senior year? Hadn’t Mr. Meyers, my eighth-grade physical science teacher, an assistant coach for the high school track team, been pulled over for drunk driving and found to have a prostitute in his car? And I certainly wasn’t innocent. How many times had I, an Honors English Student of the Year, driven home across town—or into town from fifteen miles out in the county—after a night of drinking? How many times had my friends and I pulled a ‘Hey you’ to solicit some collarless Hispanic guy in a liquor store parking lot to go buy for us? In high school I had never taken Spanish and couldn’t have asked where a bathroom was if I’d needed to go, but I’d learned how to say ‘Veinticuatro cervezas, por favor’ while holding out a twenty in a liquor store’s parking lot. And I hadn’t been a habitual user, but I’d smoked some weed of a Saturday night or two, hadn’t I?

I fell to thinking of further perversities and misalignments: the fact that I, expected by so many to go so far after my senior year, was instead teaching English at the failing high school I had graduated from; the fact that in my teaching of English, I was forbidden the use of novels, plays, and works of poetry—the bedrock foundations of our literature and towering accomplishments of our language. The fact that the person forbidding my teaching of that literature was titled the Head of Literacy…

I closed the book after finishing the story. Hawthorne knew something about the dualities and contradictions of human nature—our moral failings and hypocrisy. It was all there, everything I knew but couldn’t quite articulate, documented even if it wasn’t fully explained. “Young Goodman Brown,” I thought, putting the book back up on my shelf. It occurred to me I might teach it to my students. It would fit with my Crucible unit and discussions of the Puritans. I would teach it.

Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist and educator. His novel Why Teach? is currently being serialized on Substack and is now available in paperback and e-reader editions from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kindle Store, and Kobo!

Art credit, all sketches: Maurice Olin