Elegies for the Brokenhearted (26 page)

“My brothers and sisters!” Les says, addressing the church, “you are witnessing here God's work, God's bringing together of two people and two destinies, and making one!”

You are married within a month. You move into Les's home, which is the home you have always imagined in your dreams. A stately Colonial on a large lot, with a circular drive out front, in which Les parks his long white Cadillac. Inside everything is white—the carpet, the walls, the sofa, the linens. It is a place of such light, such dazzling beauty, that it manages to obliterate all memory of your previous suffering. Suddenly it seems to you that your life has been driving all along toward a happy ending, but you simply failed to see it until now, you simply didn't have faith. The past twenty years have been a terrible detour, but now all of your troubles are gone and you have been delivered, you have been delivered. You develop the habit of fingering the scar on your neck, dreamily. Nothing can touch you now.

 

M
other, this was your life. Full of turmoil and heartache, desperate striving, bitter failure, triumph, tragedy, redemption. A role any actress would kill for. And indeed it often seemed to me that you were acting. You laughed, you cried, you raged, you trembled, but none of it seemed quite real—all of your emotions seemed rehearsed. Over the years I came to suspect that you weren't really living your life, but making your way through a series of scenes, playing different parts, changing husbands and homes and jobs like costumes. The life around us had the thin, flimsy quality of a stage set, the walls and furniture and props made of the cheapest, lightest materials. We lived a life whose only certainty was that it would change—just when we'd settled in, just when we'd gotten comfortable, the lights would go down and the scene would be cleared away.

For years I thought of myself as your assistant, your understudy, someone standing on the sidelines with a clipboard, some category of employee who existed for the sole purpose of cataloging your every gesture. In your dealings with other people—your family, coworkers, authority figures—you always presented different versions of yourself, and you relied on me to keep everything straight.
What did I tell the landlord?
you'd ask me.
Did I tell him I was sick or did I tell him I got laid off?

“Neither,” I'd say. “You told him me and Malinda were in the hospital.”

Oh,
you'd say.
Right
. And then, a minute later,
I said that? That was stupid. He could have just stopped by and figured out you were home.

“I know,” I said. “I told you that.”

You did?

I nodded.

Well, don't let me do that again
.

One of your favorite phrases was,
Take notes
. You weren't the kind of mother who believed in protecting her children from life's difficulties. You talked all the time, and in great detail, about the stupid mistakes that had brought you to your present fate, and you spared no details.
Birth control,
you always told us, long before we had any idea what it was.
Always use birth control.
You'd look at us gravely.
Are you taking notes?
you'd say.

I had been taking notes. All those years, I liked to think that I knew you better than anyone else, better than you knew yourself. I knew when you came home late you'd need a glass of water and two pills by your bedside. I knew when you were about to quit a job, and started circling the classifieds. With men, I knew when you were working up to leaving, and started preparing for another move. In one case, with Bud Francis, I never even completely unpacked my bags.

When you joined Les's church, I assumed that your conversion would last no more than a year or two, that it was just another role you were playing. It wasn't a part I particularly cared for. After your
spiritual rebirth,
as you called it, your voice took on a spooky calm, a lightness that I found unsettling. You had also adopted a preposterous southern accent.
What a beautiful day the Lord has made,
you'd say when I called to talk.

“Would you knock it off?” I said. “It's me. You don't have to pretend around me.”

I don't know what you mean,
you said.
I'm disappointed in your attitude.

“Are you fucking kidding me with this accent? You sound like Minnie fucking Pearl!”

I'm sorry you're so angry,
you said.
You should really come join the church and learn how to live in God's love.

When I called to tell you about my search for Malinda—that I'd found her, and she'd slipped away again, right between my fingers—you barely registered surprise or even interest.
I'm sure you'll find her again soon,
you said.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.

“Well the Lord,” I said, “seems to be on a cigarette break.”

Mary,
you said,
sarcasm is the defense of the weak.

Mary,
you said,
silence is a way of closing God out of your heart.

I told myself that it was just a phase, that it couldn't possibly last. You'd come out of it soon enough. And when you did, you'd find me.

I went off to graduate school without even telling you where I was going, and for two whole years we didn't speak. The only connection I had left in our hometown was Walter Adams. For years Walter and I had been playing chess by mail, our letters going back and forth every week, the pace so glacially slow that it took us years to finish a game. Along with his moves (he was fond of traps—Lasker, Monticelli) Walter always wrote a line or two about what he was reading and listening to, just a few phrases dashed off. But in the winter of my second year of graduate school Walter sent a long letter about the sorry state of our city. It had changed drastically in the time since I'd left for college—several of its major employers had failed or relocated—and now it seemed that every third house or business was boarded up, abandoned. The schools were a particular problem. The kids in our city were stuck in a failing system. There was a desperate need for good teachers. Walter's son Reggie, whom I'd never gotten to know very well but whom I'd always admired for his cool reserve, had already worked his way up to assistant principal at our old high school, and there was a position for me there, if I wished to take it. “You might find other useful things to do with your life,” Walter wrote, “but you will find nothing more useful than this.”

And so I moved back to town, partly with the idea of teaching but also because, much to my surprise, I found myself unable to live anywhere else. The towns I'd lived in since leaving home had presented to me landscapes, versions of life, which I acknowledged to be superior in all ways to the life I'd known, and yet those beautiful college towns also struck me as deluded. I lived in them only partly, I walked through them the way one walks in dreams, with a weightless ease one is startled by, but which one also understands, on some deep level, to be false.

My old high school had taken on the feel of a prison. One was obliged to enter through a metal detector, to surrender one's bag for inspection. There were security guards walking the hallways, with fat clubs attached to their belts. The walls were gray, fluorescent tube lighting flickered overhead. Years prior the hallways had been outfitted with corkboards, to display artwork and announcements, but now these were empty. One of the boards had a heading that read
COMING EVENTS
, but there was nothing underneath it—just dozens of old staples embedded in the cork and the tiny corners of bright paper from old flyers, announcing events long past.

Most of the students at the school were there because they were required by law to be there. If statistics held up, almost half of them would drop out as soon as they were old enough. In the meantime they cut class and forgot their books, they made their test sheets into paper airplanes and launched them at me, they talked during class, listened to headphones, fell asleep. The only way to get them to display the slightest interest in learning was to teach them foul language and insulting sentences they might one day find useful. “Do you want to learn how to tell someone to go screw themselves?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” they said.

“Let's conjugate,” I said. “I screw, you screw, he, she, it screws.”

“You're tricking us,” they said. “You're trying to trick us into learning something.”

“We screw,” I said, “you plural screw, they screw.”

“Just tell us how to say it,” they said.

“And the command form would be?” I asked. “Anyone want to guess? To screw yourself? Anyone?”

Reggie had explained to me that, in a school like this, every teacher had to find what he called a “coping mechanism.” Each teacher had developed his or her own style, and so long as that style fell short of criminal liability, it was something to be encouraged. Some teachers walked around the classroom with wooden sticks, which they crashed down on a student's desk when they suspected that student wasn't paying attention. One teacher carried a lighter which she called “the flame of knowledge,” and which she liked to ignite casually, as she walked between the rows of seats. When she caught someone misbehaving she ignited the flame very close to his ear. “Are you listening to me?” she said.

“The thing is,” Reggie said, “when you start something, you have to see it all the way through, or else they know they got you. Don't go changing your coping mechanism halfway through the class, or even halfway through the year. You pick it, you marry it, you stick with it, even if it kills you.”

I'd chosen a bad coping mechanism. I'd start a lesson and the class would be under control for the first ten minutes or so. Then the students would grow restless and start talking, mouthing off, and I'd turn off the lights and sit in the dark staring at them blankly. Sometimes when I did this they settled down, but more often they didn't, and they spent the rest of the class talking and chasing each other around the room like three-year-olds.

The only hope I had in the classroom were the immigrants (a large number of kids had moved to our city from India, and a few from Africa) whose Old World manners prevented them from making a mockery of their teachers. They were a quiet, mournful group who—despite being teenagers—looked and dressed and conducted themselves with the soberness of undertakers. Because of the pressure their families put on them, these kids were the only ones who routinely did their homework and remembered to bring their books. They were the only ones to volunteer in class. But their participation was often disheartening. Their lives, the ways they'd suffered, made my life look like a sock hop. Even the most benign subjects—the kinds of things people talk about when they are learning a new language—had a way of turning disastrous.

“Tell me about the house you grew up in,” I'd say.

“It wasn't so much of a house as a tent, with additional rooms made from cardboard. It burned down.”

“Well, tell me about your family, then.”

“My mother is dead,” they'd say. “My father is dead also. My uncle brought me here but he works three jobs and I never see him.”

I'd shift gears, desperately. “What do you like most about living in the United States?”

“Nothing,” they said. “We dislike it here.”

“Nothing at all? You don't like even one little thing?”

“We dislike the houses, the way everyone is shut away in small compartments and there is no community. We dislike the way everyone goes around in cars. The loneliness.”

“If you had to,” I said, “if there were a gun pointed to your head, could you name something you don't mind so much?”

“There are guns?” they said. “We were told there wouldn't be any guns in the schools here.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I was only using an expression.”

“What kind of expression is this?”

“Let's move on,” I said. “What do you want to do in the future?”

“Return home,” they said. “Leave here and return home.”

I spent half of my time worrying I'd be fired, and the other half relaxed in the sad knowledge that I couldn't be let go—the school was understaffed to begin with. I considered calling in sick to work on a regular basis, like all of the other teachers. If you wanted to last at a job like that, they told me, you had to pace yourself, and pacing yourself meant calling in sick to school every thirteen days. We had enough sick and personal days in our contract, they said, to do that, and only a fool would let those days go by unused. “Take the day off,” they said. “Take yourself to a movie.”

Most days after school I returned to my apartment and collapsed on the couch. Being around other people had always taxed me, and the climate at school was a particular strain. All afternoon I'd drift in and out of sleep. Then the sun would go down and the apartment would grow dark, and I'd get up and make myself something to eat, turn on the television and sit in its glow. Amidst its chatter I'd start preparing for the next day. Every night I told myself that I'd do better the following day—things were bound to turn, I believed—but by February I'd begun having my doubts. When I sat down to correct quizzes they were more often than not left blank, but for desperate little notes at the top. “Dear Ms. Murphy,” they said, “I did not study for this 'cuz I got in a wicked bad fight with my boyfriend. Sorry.” Or, “My friend was trying to kill himself and I was up all night trying to get him not to do it. Sorry.” Or sometimes, “Dear Miz Murphy, I don't feel like doing this test, sorry but sometimes you just gotta say fuck it. Excuse my French.” I gave them all zeros, then wondered how many zeroes I could reasonably give out. Would I keep on failing everyone? Could I fail the whole class? At a certain point, wasn't their failure my fault?