A Hole in Juan (4 page)

Or maybe, as Mackenzie would have suggested, I was once again overreacting. They were seventeen years old and their engines didn’t need a slow start.

Allie spotted me when I was a few steps from the top of the double staircase, and nodded and smiled—too much of a smile, I thought.

Then she turned back to Nita, leaned close and whispered, all the while leading her friend farther down the hall, away from me, and away from my classroom door.

Nita looked my way while she listened to Allie’s whisper, then turned back and continued the whispered conversation.

Conspirators. I heard my mind declare this and realized I had been contaminated by Jar. Would I have even noted the ordinary scene of two girls sharing secrets if I hadn’t had the encounter with him?

For better or for worse, a school is too filled with ongoing life to allow much brooding or pondering. The bell is always about to ring and present you with a new mass of personalities and issues, not to mention learning material, to deal with. You have no choice but to move on.

So even if I wanted to figure out what was going on with Nita and Allie or their classmates in Juan Reyes’s class, there was no time to do so. A few minutes were given over to the clerical duties of homeroom, followed quickly by my first period class, my juniors, and, as Harriet would have it, their “TV show.”

This class had a spark and enthusiasm for almost anything, most recently poetry, which I need not say isn’t always a guaranteed hit.

Today, they were almost visibly thrumming with excitement.

Big-time closed-circuit TV.

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We’d been dipping into various genres, and I tried to find works that had an element with which they could identify. I try to do this when possible, and, since that’s what makes great literature great, it’s always possible. With poetry, it’s easy to find works that touch on the universal emotions—love, death, grief, and joy. As a plus, poems are short, and brevity is the prime consideration with many of my students.

I also try to correlate—when it makes sense—the history, times, and social problems reflected in the prose and poetry we read. Sometimes it works and they discover the idea that fiction and poetry might be relevant to the larger world.

It doesn’t always work. There are whiny questions about why we have to talk about Puritans when we read
The Scarlet Letter.

Didn’t that stuff belong in history class? They wanted everything kept circumscribed and too often behaved as if it were rude of me to snatch ideas from another discipline and try to show the connections.

But so far, this class was open for whatever I suggested. If there were a pageant for high school sections, they’d win the Miss Congeniality prize. They’d shown enthusiasm for Whit-man, and still more for Ginsberg’s “Howl” and for Dylan’s lyrics, and had responded emotionally when we read World War I poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and with actual gasps at the opening lines of Wilfred Owens’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”

They were excited that poetry was not always their stereotypical image of a man skipping in a field of daisies and rhapsodiz-ing about it, but that it could be powerful, funny, or revelatory. It could be whatever the poet’s talents allowed.

And then, a series of students separately confessed to me that they, too, found expression and solace by writing poems and, to my absolute amazement, they were willing to go public with their creations.

That was a fine teaching day as far as my professional ego was 27

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concerned, because I felt I’d created a safe enough atmosphere for them to be willing to express themselves—even adolescent boys, which made it something akin to a miracle.

Last week, the day of the false alarm, about a dozen had read their work to their classmates, and it was such an unanticipated treat that the class suggested we bring the “show,” as they called it, to the school at large.

Going public with some of the goopy June-moon-swoon cute-puppy verses was beside the point. Their words were as close to their honest emotions as they could get—or, perhaps, afford to get—at this age and in public, and I wanted to encourage them, to endorse verbal creativity as a desirable activity.

The poets, working hard to overcome shyness and terror, agreed, and today was the day. I was delighted. As incomprehensible as it seemed to me, polls had shown a majority of the U.S.

populace would choose death rather than speak in public. This event was stealth public speaking and the innocent bards had suggested it themselves.

All went well from start to finish. Alison Brody had a brief attack of stage fright when the camera was brought into the classroom, but she got over it and was able to deliver her surprisingly touching sonnet about her grandmother’s death. I was proud and, I admit, astonished at how she’d empathized with the woman, basing each stanza on a name the woman had been called, from baby nicknames to “darling” to Mrs. Brody, Mama, and Grandma. Alison had been able to see her as a woman with a history of her own, and that was no mean feat.

And Joey Myers, despite self-consciousness that dyed his cheeks vermilion, was brave and resolute enough to read his verses about his dog, a sweet but intellectually challenged pooch.

His nose reddened as he related the dog’s death, and he spoke his final line in a thickened voice:

The good thing was

We never let him know that

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Dogs should be smart.

He died feeling clever and wise.

Having said his piece, eyes on the floor, Joey cleared his throat then looked up and around, and glared, daring anybody to question his manliness just because he’d loved his dumb doggie.

Nobody did.

Lily’s poem “Supposing” was overly reminiscent of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and of course it was about peace and loving one another. (“Supposing there’s no labels, and only human beings, no boundaries between them . . .”) And even though it so closely followed the rhythms of the original that you could hum its melody as she read, she called it an “homage”—and who were we to disagree?

Along the same blameless lines, Cheryl Stevens had perhaps absorbed too much Dylan—or perhaps it was Sassoon’s poem,

“Does It Matter?” that began, “Does it matter?—losing your legs?

For people will always be kind . . .” But the passionate emotions of her poem, “Does It Count?” were personal. Her adored older cousin had returned from Iraq blind and it was clear that she, too, had been scarred by what she saw as the meaninglessness of his loss.

The news tallies casualties and we

Check the numbers dead and sigh.

A wound makes you an also-ran.

You don’t count.

They should describe each injury,

Say what the still-breathing have left,

What part is broken, gone or bleeding, how much, how
long the pain.

Make people understand that

Being twenty-one and blind forever counts.

The next stanza began, “They teach us not to kill . . . unless they change their minds,” and went on to the contradictions of war and a metaphorical blindness.

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Cheryl had something special. I was sure that if she kept at it, borrowing and adapting or not, she would hack through all the other voices and find her own, and when she did, it would be well worth hearing.

The reading went smoothly without a noticeable hitch, and classmates who’d already heard these works were attentive and supportive, applauding each poet with convincing enthusiasm.

We ended the hour on a high, having done something innovative and brave—and we were talking about Philly Prep, not your most intellectually stimulating or academically involved school.

Take that, Juan Reyes!

It had been a great morning. “I’m so proud of all of you,” I said.

And I was, but a proud English teacher should remember where, chronologically, pride goeth.

The tenth graders had enjoyed
A Separate Peace,
though not as wildly as I’d hoped. At first, they complained about the fictional-ized prep school’s playing fields, the lunches served, and the exquisite-sounding surrounds versus the urban realities of Philly Prep. Their prep school had concrete sidewalks ringing the building, the gymnasium for basketball, and a tennis court up on the third floor where there’d once been a roof garden.

I pointed out the rigorous academic requirements of the novel’s school, and the fact that there were no girls on that cam-pus, and they simmered down and moved on to the issues the book presented.

The 1950s sensibility that wrote it, and the 1940s sensibilities that informed it were a stretch for them—but worthwhile when we “translated” some of what the book took for granted—

World War II and the home front, rationing, the draft, and the attitudes toward the war and service. Once again, history seeped into the English classroom, but this group didn’t seem to find that an intrusion.

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This morning, we talked about the pivotal moment in the book when Gene jostles the tree branch and doesn’t reach to help Finney, who is also balancing on it, thereby ensuring his friend’s plummet to earth.

“Don’t forget,” Ma’ayan Atias said. “Finney had saved Gene on that branch. And Finney hadn’t caused the problem then, the way Gene did now.”

“Good point,” I said. “Why do you think Gene suddenly jostled the branch?”

“Gene was scared of jumping off that tree,” Ben said. “He, like, had to, or—”

“Or what?” Ma’ayan snapped. “Gene was scared of
losing!

Everything was about losing or winning to him.”

“But—but it wasn’t a contest, really.” Ben’s cheeks slowly turned color until they looked as if somebody had scraped them.

Ma’ayan was a formidable debater made even more so by her self-assurance. And she had the ultimate weapon—she was cute, thereby rendering boys her age, particularly Benjamin, tongue-tied or speechless.

“Yes it was!” she said with great authority.

Ben had the dogged appeal of someone doomed to lose, but determined to stay the course. “Finney was better at sports,” he said softly.

“But Gene was better at academics,” I said, joining the match.

“Yes,” Ben said. “Yes. But . . . sports are more important—

not with teachers, but with kids?” His wistfulness was heartbreaking. Ben appeared made completely of Tinker Toys, sticks and spools, with a large—intelligent—head on top. He grew almost visibly day by day, and he didn’t look as if all the new inches had been wired yet, so he didn’t function as a unit. It was obvious that athletics would have to wait until he got the neurons firing in sync.

“But also, also—because Finney didn’t have to follow the 31

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rules. That’s another reason Gene was angry, even if he didn’t say so.” Ma’ayan waved her hand in the air while she spoke. Speaking in turn was the rule of the classroom, raising your hand first.

Her hand followed the rules, signaling that she wanted to be called on, but the rest of her couldn’t contain her idea one second longer.

“What does that mean?” I asked her. “Why might that be so?”

“Because . . . because Finney wasn’t worried about what people thought the way Gene was. He wore that pink shirt, except why that was such a big deal, I don’t know.”

Ben swallowed hard before speaking. “Because it made him look—
pink.
You know,
pink
—”

“Gay,”
a male voice interrupted from the back of the room, and there was a burst of nudge-nudge laughter.

Only a brief burst after a glance from me, but the winks and faces continued on. They always do, and it always depresses me.

“Jeez,” Ma’ayan said, her posture and expression of incredulous disdain as regal and remote as Queen Victoria’s must have been. “Like wearing a certain color makes you whatever! But anyway, Finney wasn’t afraid to wear it.”

“It might be worth considering,” I said, interrupting her,

“that a pink shirt was more outrageous when this book took place. So think of what it meant that Finney didn’t mind wearing it. And try to expand your minds a bit and think about this: The boys at this school would all be wearing white shirts, and any colored shirt might suggest something, aside from a sexual prefer-ence.”

“Unconventional! Not worrying about what people think!”

Ella, a diminutive blonde, had gotten a word in and she sat back and smiled at her accomplishment.

“He said it was to honor the bombing of Central Europe,”

Ben said softly, glancing at Ma’ayan to see whether she’d noticed.

“But it wasn’t, really,” she replied. “He made that up! Maybe GILLIAN ROBERTS

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Gene wished he could be that way, that . . .” She wrinkled her brow and actually paused for a breath as she searched for the word. “That free?” she asked.

“You know how you can get angry with somebody because they have—I mean inside, their personality, what you want?”

The freckled red-haired boy’s name refused to stick in my mind.

I knew it wasn’t Jack because that’s the name my brain insisted was his. Maybe he wouldn’t mind being called not-Jack . . . “I mean you
like
that person, but you’re jealous,” not-Jack added.

“Would you—could you—hate that person if he’s your friend?” I felt like a referee, but they were doing the hard lifting, and I was enjoying the back-and-forth.

They thought for a while, then Ben of the elbows spoke again. “Maybe more if he’s your friend,” he said. “Because they like you, but you’re having these secret bad feelings about them, so you’d hate them for making you feel that way, wouldn’t you?”

He always looked at Ma’ayan as he spoke, and I could see—

even if she refused to—a desperate and heartbreaking lovesick-ness. He was trying to win the fair maiden’s attention through his mental agility, but the fair maiden was in love with her own thoughts, not his, and definitely not with the nonthinking parts of him.