Unraveling Read online

  Reborn, apparently, into a life plagued by some cruel, recurring amnesia. Because yesterday did, in fact, happen. And so did the day before yesterday. And the day before that.

  “You mean… Madonna… the, um…”

  “Yeah. You know… Madonna.” Ashley says this with enough self-evident incredulity to level mountains. Her neon-frosted eyes roll over and down to a girl in the next row – Brittany Kline, according to my seating chart – who shrugs back at Ashley uncomprehendingly.

  “Okay. Madonna.” The name goes on the board. I am unfazed. I am young and hip and rolling with it.

  “Why Madonna?” I roll up my sleeves and cross my arms. I am in the trenches. On the front lines, making a difference.

  “It’s not like I listen to her now or anything cuz she’s totally old and everything, but she’s like totally opened a lot of doors for women in this culture and around the world by empowering them to express their sexuality and taking a stand and everything like that.”

  Bad start. That’s all. Luck of the draw. This will get better. I keep moving.

  “Okay. Okay. Fair enough.” I arch the chalk through the air from left hand to right. “Let’s get some more names on the board. Give me someone important that goes way, way back. Let’s go waaaaaayyyyy back. Pull out all the stops. Whaddaya got? Mr. Onaya, go for it. Who’s your favorite historical figure?”

  “George Washington.”

  “Yes!” Bam! On the board! I’m rolling. “Who’s next? Ms. Kent. Lemme have it.”

  “Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Okay. Good. Good. Next. Alicia, who’s your favorite?”

  “George Washington.”

  “We already have him.”

  “Yeah, but he’s my favorite.”

  “Okay, good. But give me some other important historical figure I can put up here so we can talk about what makes them influential today.”

  “But I like George Wa…”

  “You don’t have to like the person, you just have to think they played an important role historically.”

  “Abraham Lincoln.”

  I underline the name that, like George Washington’s, is already on the board. The pressure between my molars is beginning to show in my temples. “Try again.”

  “Indiana Jones.”

  My theory is that all optimists are, of necessity, “historically challenged.” Optimism is a kind of dementia caused by a weakness of memory. A pleasant by-product of a serious mental deficiency.

  Optimists are not to be admired or emulated. They are to be pitied. Wiley Coyote was an optimist.

  “Okay. Indiana Jones. Not a real person, but what the hell.”

  Indy goes on the board in a hard, sharp fray of fractured chalk next to the name that does not refer to the Holy Mother of God.

  “Who else? Let’s just go down the seating chart. Brian? Give me your best.”

  “George Washington.”

  “Dean?”

  “Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Kevin?”

  “The Pope.”

  “Which Pope?”

  “I thought there was only one.”

  My problem is that I have too good a grip on the past. This is probably why I am a history teacher and certainly why I am an optimist of the ephemeral, masochistic variety. This is why Tilly tells me I need to learn to “let go and move on.” This is why every day is a “new day” only for a little while; like a rental sprayed with that “new car” fragrance certain to wear off in a couple of hours. The smell of cigarettes and body odor is in that thing to stay. But such is the stench of history.

  “Why don’t I just put down Pope as a generic title rather than as a particular person. Kashawnda Davis, you’re next.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Francis?”

  “Jesus.”

  “Bill.”

  “Yeah. I’ll have to go with Jesus too, Mr. Johns.”

  So, in a way, getting up in the morning believing that you are willing to start clean is optimism. It is a tiny, highly-perched, crystalline sort of optimism. Bright, precious and exceedingly delicate. Please, no touching the optimism! Back away from the optimism! I wake up feeling good about the world and about me in it. Maybe for about an hour and a half or so. While I take a shower and drink my coffee and feed my fish and drive to work.

  Then I start coming into contact with other humans. That is when everything goes, inevitably, straight to shit.

  “Dirk?”

  “Michael Jordan.”

  In the end, optimism is simply faith. Not faith in God so much as faith in the living. And faith – in the living or in God – requires more patience and suspended disbelief than my battered psyche can possibly endure.

  “Sean.”

  “Burt Reynolds.”

  “Shannon?”

  “Gumby.”

  It is 10:37 in the morning on the first day of school. They are young and perky and brimming with the future of our species. One by one, I want to rip their hearts out of their little chests.

  Did I say crystalline? My optimism is not crystalline. My optimism is origami. And reality, my reality anyway, is a hurricane.

  “Brittany? Yes, you.”

  “Mozart.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”

  Hmm. I turn and write the name and then turn back. She is smiling. Attentive. Beaming at me. Her friend Ashley – of the Madonna Historical Society – is amused, twirling her gum. But this one – Brittany was it? – There is something different here. There is a connection between teacher and student that I have not felt anywhere else in the room. She is tall for her age. A breadth of shoulder is developing. She stands out from her peers in all directions. In the face there is just a hint of the coming woman. And yet, she is all girl. There is a violin case beneath her desk.

  “Mozart. Interesting. Why Mozart?”

  “Because he was a genius.”

  “Okay. So? Being a genius automatically gets you on the list of important historical figures?”

  “No. It’s not what you’ve got, Mr. Johns. It’s how you use it.” The class picks up on her, presumably, unintended innuendo. She does not react or break her gaze. I silence the sniggering with a hand.

  “And how did Mozart use his genius, Brittany?”

  “To make the world beautiful in a way no one ever had before.”

  She is honest and clean and eager. She smiles a purity of potential that is the reason I get up in the morning and come to this place. She makes up for all of them. My God, how hope does spring eternal.

  * * *

  Shepp drops by over lunch. His room is at the other end of the school. I have survived three classes and I am famished. I am sitting with my feet up on the desk mowing through a PBJ and an apple. I haven’t seen Shepp in months. He’s got his good-looking, tanned, surfer-dude thing going and I secretly envy his whole laid-back air. Always have. Must be nice to be so relaxed about… everything.

  “Yo, Shepp,” I say, chewing. “Dave.”

  “Good summer?”

  “You know it, man. You?”

  A question not susceptible to a concise answer. I shrug and take another bite of apple. Shepp slaps me on the back and continues his unbroken glide into the room, somehow finding a way to fold his six- foot frame into a desk directly in front of me.

  “I see they’re already giving you apples,” he says wryly. “Let the bribery begin.”

  “The ones that aren’t willing to give me money for a grade give me fruit,” I tell him with my mouth full. “It’s a guaranteed ‘C’ in my class.”

  A cloud of concerned incomprehension takes over his face as he reads the jarring train wreck of names on the board behind me.

  “Michael Jackson… Benjamin Franklin… Little Joe Cartwright… George Washington the 8th.”

  “No.” I scold him with my half-eaten apple. “That’s eight George Washingtons, Shepp.”

  “Richard Nixon… Harry Potter… Does that say Gumby?”<
br />
  “Yep.”

  “I give up, man. What the hell are you teaching these kids?”

  “Lessons in humility.”

  “That would make you the…”

  “Student.”

  “Right.”

  “Welcome to Academic Sadomasochism 101.”

  “Shit, dude. I dissected frogs all day.”

  “God, you actually give these monsters scalpels? Do you have to tell them not to grab the pointy end?”

  “Ha! This is a post-9/11, post-Columbine world, my friend. Even in biology. No more scalpels. I do all the cutting, they get the forceps.”

  “That’s rich. They don’t need scalpels to kill you, Shepp. They have this terrifying ability to open their mouths and suck all of the oxygen out of the room. You need to worry about suffocation every bit as much as laceration. Give me the frogs, you take the kids.”

  “You don’t give ‘em enough credit, man. Little sponges, remember?” Shepp flips his blonde mane outside of his collar and leans for-ward, arranging his fingers as though he were grasping something very, very small.

  “Little sponges.”

  “Whatever. Their historical knowledge and overall intellectual functioning is roughly equivalent to that of tiny sponges. So yeah, good point there, Shepp.”

  “Someone needs to get laid.” He reclines again, letting each arm flop over the neighboring desks.

  “You always say that.”

  “Because it’s always true. You still playing chopsticks with that Buddhist bombshell?”

  “Mae is not a Buddhist.”

  “Not the point, dude. Chopsticks?”

  “Yeah, sure, if you must know.”

  “Good lookin’ woman, man. Lucky bastard.”

  “Oh give me just a small break, Shepp. How many women are you doing right now. Four? Five?”

  “Numbers… they’re so… cold sounding.” He examines his fingernails and pretends to look offended.

  “Shepp.” I look at him with a weariness that simply picks up where we had left things in the spring. He looks back with an over-the-top earnestness. His teeth and eyes are shocking.

  “Okay. By doing, do you mean seeing in a romantic way or do you mean, like, something offensive to Baptists?”

  “Please. Do you ever see anyone in a romantic way, Shepp?”

  “Just about everyone.”

  “Cut the shit. Do I have to ask you directly?”

  “Oh… you mean am I still having…”

  “Yes.”

  “Sex…”

  “Yes.”

  “With five or six women…”

  “Yes.”

  “At the same time?”

  “Yes.”

  His smile is positively shit-eating. “I just love your round-about sort of directness, Dave. What do you have against the whole group thing, anyway?”

  “Same thing I have against sharing needles.”

  “Really? So it’s a health concern?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “So, what, there’s something magic that happens bacteriologically when there are more than two people in the room?”

  “Being in the room is not the issue. In the bed is the issue.”

  “We never do it in bed.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Okay. Think of the last five women you’ve had sex with.”

  I take another bite and chew at him thoughtfully. I look at the ceiling and pretend to sift through dozens of mental images, sorting them chronologically. Against my will, I end up with a disturbing mélange of sexual history sloshing around my brain in vivid color; different girls and women from different eras of my life, some I had slept with, others I had dreamed of sleeping with and still others that terrify me to this day, all mixing together like dangerous and unstable chemicals that should not be in the same beaker at the same time. There is a reason that personal history is linear and that women, like increments of time, are meant to be experienced seriatim.

  “And?”

  “And did you engage in unsafe sex with any of them?”

  “No.”

  “Now imagine them all in one night. Same conduct. No difference. Wear your little condoms. No less safe. See?”

  “Just how simple are you?”

  “Dave, why spread out over years, one relationship at a time, what you can do in one night?”

  “What… this is all about coital efficiency? There are some sort of orgasmic economies of scale involved here?”

  “I see you’ve really loosened up over the summer.” He rolls his eyes dramatically and I instantly want to kill him.

  “What kind of woman does this, Shepp?” I am actually something close to angry and this surprises me a little. “Who is it that makes a date for sex with three or four other people one Saturday night like she is going to a pizza party? I mean really. Who the fuck are these women?”

  “I serve pizza. They bring their boyfriends. It’s a great party. Why don’t you and Mae come over on Friday?”

  There is a quiet, serious moment in which I have no earthly idea of how to respond. Then Shepp laughs so hard I think he is going to cry. I am determined to assist in this emotional transition. The Red Delicious catches him squarely on his beautiful forehead.

  * * *

  I am not home again until 5:30. First-day administrative crap. Teacher orientation. Meet the new principal. Then briefing on the new security protocols. I sit in my driveway skimming a list of new rules printed in large, bolded, and italicized type.

  PROBLEM: BOMB THREAT EVACUATION.

  There is a ten-point protocol. Number six wins for its sheer absurdity.

  WORK IN TEAMS OF TWO TO COVER EACH ROOM, INCLUDING ALL HALLWAYS, CAFETERIA, LIBRARY, GYMNASIUM, AND RESTROOMS (FACULTY MAY NOT ENTER OPPOSITE-GENDER RESTROOMS WITHOUT FIRST KNOCKING, IDENTIFYING THEMSELVES FROM THE DOORWAY AND POLITELY ADVISING ALL OCCUPANTS OF THE NEED TO EVACUATE).

  I imagine myself knocking on the door, trying to follow these instructions in the face of a credible bomb threat. Anybody in here? Hello? This is Mr. Johns. I’m a teacher. I am also a man. If you wouldn’t mind terribly, I really need you to finish your business, get your things together and follow me out to the Northeast… I know for a fact that it will never hap-pen that way. It is far more likely that I will dispense with the knocking entirely, kick open the door and yell at whoever is inside to get off the toilet and run. I mean, really. Who do these people think I am? Have they even met Ashley? Uh… like, what kind of bomb, Mr. Johns? Will it like totally explode and everything like that? Believe me, I am not wasting a single fucking second.

  PROBLEM: HOSTAGE-TAKING BY STUDENTS, FACULTY, ADMINISTRATOR OR OTHER ARMED ASSAILANT.

  Protocol Number Four boldly declares the obvious:

  IF THE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTS ITSELF, LEAVE THE BUILDING CALMLY AND QUIETLY THROUGH THE NEAREST EXIT (WINDOWS PERMISSIBLE).

  The packet goes on for twenty pages, each in the same bold, all-caps, italicized scream.

  Enough. Enough of this. I climb out of the car with my high school security briefing and head inside, relieved to know that I have permission to calmly dive through a window in the event little Ashley shows up one day with a Glock 9.

  The house is empty. Eerily so. I am still not used to Mae’s absence. She has left before. Twice. The whole production. Clothes, cosmetics, leftover food crammed into suitcases. Snot, tears, shattered porcelain. Black rubber scars on the driveway. But I always knew she would come back. Her absence always seemed somehow temporary.

  This time… not so much. The silence in the house has that permanent ring to it. At some point I will have to tell people that it is really over. Shepp. God, my parents. They’ll beat it to death. Maybe I can keep it quiet for a couple of years. Mae sends her regrets; it’s the flu again. Mae would have come but she’s in intensive care. Mae can’t make it; she’s been kidnapped. Shit. Sooner or later. I banish the thought with a shudder.

  There are no fewer than five messages on my answering machine.
I dump my stuff on the couch and grab the fish food. I sprinkle over the bubbles, listening to the robotic voice that is a poor substitute for Mae’s delicate accent.

  “MESSAGE ONE…NINE FIF…TEEN…A.M. Hi, David! Mom here. I know you’re in class. I hope the first day is going terrific. Well, not your first day but… well, you know. First day this year. For your students. Oh, never mind. I just had to call you and share the good news. I just know you’ll be so surprised. Can you guess? Call me back when you get home and I’ll tell you. See if you can guess! It’s just so exciting! Bye, David!

  “MESSAGE TWO…NINE SEVEN…TEEN…A.M. Hi, David! It’s me again. Mom. I can’t stand it. I’m having a meltdown. Are you ready? Here it is: Tilly’s been nominated for an award! Ha! An Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize! At Sundance! CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE THAT? Your sister, David! YOUR SISTER! At Sundance! That’s Robert Redford’s thing you know. Robert Redford! Your father is pretending not to be so impressed or surprised, but I know better. And Ben has been dancing up a storm all afternoon. Oh, this is so excit… Ooo… call waiting! Bye, David!

  “MESSAGE THREE…NINE TWENTY…ONE…A.M. Hi, David! It’s me again! Your mother. Sorry. That was your uncle Wilson. Tilly told Bev and then she told Stan and, well, you know how it goes out there. Suddenly they’re all interested in Tilly’s career and want in on the action. They haven’t even seen the movie. Well, I guess neither has your father but that’s just because, you know, he likes to think he’s above it all. I’ve seen … BEEP, BEEP, BEEP … Hello? Hollis?... BEEP, BEEP … Hollis? Hello? What? I’m on the phone with David. Oh. Hi, David. No, not really on the phone, Hollis, I’m leaving him a message. Well for… Susan, you’ve been on the damn phone all morning. I need to make a call! Listen, Hollis, I don’t need the tone right now, okay? I’ll be off in minute! Susan … the boy isn’t even home. You can talk to him – in person – later. Hang up. HOLLIS… I… SAID... I... WILL...BE... OFF... IN ...

  “MESSAGE FOUR... NINE TWENTY... FIVE... A.M. Hi, David. It’s me again. Your mother. Sorry about that. Ugh! Your father. He stomped off in a huff. I’m sure that means he won’t talk to me for three days now. He’ll barricade himself in his study with a bottle of wine and we won’t see him for a week. He’s just too much. The man has no patience and, frankly I’m very tired of the drinking and he just treats me like crap anymore. He can find his own damn phone. Can you just imagine the reaction if I interrupted one of his calls! Oh, we’d never hear the end of... Oh, just a second David. YES, AS A