Pug Hill (21 page)

“Let’s give them another minute or two, and then let’s get started.”

We all sit in silence; it’s a silence so anticipatory, it’s almost painful. I distract myself from all the anxiety, floating like bubbles all around us, by looking sideways over at Alec and thinking that he’s hot.
Super hot,
I think in spite of myself, and then I think,
Really Hope, how far away can penis-lunging actually be?

I hold on to the edges of my desk, less because I am concerned about the penis-lunging and much more because I am afraid of the video camera guy situated directly behind me. I wonder if everyone is afraid of the video camera guy, and if the video camera guy is secretly laughing at us.

“Who wants to go first?” Beth Anne asks after a moment. No one says anything. I stare at the floor, tighten my grip on the surface of my desk.

“Anyone?”

“I will go first,” Rachel says. I look up at her; she is blinking, quite quickly, over and over again.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Beth Anne says in her best you-are-all-little-children-of-mine voice. “We’ll be picking partners to step outside with us, to help us with our relaxation exercises and preparations. A sort of coach, if you will. Rachel, why don’t you pick someone to be your coach,” Beth Anne instructs. I look quickly back down at the floor—
eye contact is bad, very bad—
and think how very much I don’t want her to pick me.

“I pick Lawrence,” Rachel says. Loosening my grip on my chair, I relax ever so slightly. I squeeze one hand over the other, because now my hands hurt. A slight wave of guilt washes over me for wanting, so vehemently, not to be Rachel’s coach. But it wasn’t, I assure myself, just because I think Rachel is very freaky, but also because, come on, clearly I am in no position to be anyone’s coach.

“Okay, then. Let’s begin.”

Beth Anne walks toward the door, motioning for Rachel and Lawrence to follow her. The three leave, closing the door behind them. The four of us remaining sit in silence, everyone staring at the floor until the door opens again. Everyone looks up, but only Beth Anne has returned, Rachel and Lawrence are still out in the hall. Beth Anne smiles at us sweetly and takes a seat among us in one of the chair-desks, daintily smoothing her purple peasant skirt down behind her before she sits. We all continue sitting in silence together, and we all continue staring at the floor.

I look across the room quickly at Alec. He looks up at me and our eyes meet for a second, and I think it’s in a good way; in fact I’m pretty sure it is. I don’t know what on earth comes over me, but rather than spazzing out a little bit and looking away quickly, I keep looking at him, and I smile. Alec smiles back at me and we’re the only ones here; there’s no Beth Anne, no Amy, no Lindsay. Actually, we’re not even here, we’re far away from here, and we’re not learning how to overcome our presentation anxiety, presentation anxiety is so very far from our minds. We’re on a couch somewhere, making out. Then I remind myself I don’t want to make out with someone who uses the word “dude” so frequently in conversation, and look away.

The door opens and Lawrence and Rachel walk in. Lawrence takes his seat and opens his notebook and picks up a pen. Rachel walks up to the front of the room. The video camera guy comes out from behind the camera and shows Rachel how to hook the lavaliere microphone onto the collar of her T-shirt. As the video camera guy heads back to his post, and Rachel says, “Testing, testing,” into the mike and it comes out loud and clear and amplified, I notice how the wire of the microphone rests on the giant shelf of her chest, how it’s almost parallel to the floor.

Rachel stands at the front of the room, very straight and very still. She looks slowly around the room, stopping to lock eyes with each of us. Taking the Room: how you’re supposed to pause before you make a speech, how you’re supposed to look around calmly, confidently making eye contact with a bunch of people in the audience. It did not, the first time I heard the phrase, sound at all like something I’d like to do. And, watching Rachel as she does it, I’m still not sure about the Taking of the Room. There’s something about it, an awkwardness, a neediness in it even, that makes me wonder again if this is something that’s really done. It seems then that maybe the video camera guy doesn’t know about Taking the Room (which in itself makes you wonder) because Rachel’s not quite done with her journey of eye contact around the room when he interrupts to say, “Whenever you’re ready.”

Rachel looks momentarily flustered. Beth Anne, who is sitting right next to where the video camera guy is standing, looks up at him and whispers something, and he nods.

Rachel looks down at an index card she is holding in her hands, pauses, takes a breath, and looks back at us. “I’m here to talk to you about remote viewing,” she says. “Remote viewing is the ability to watch other people from inside your own mind.”

And I know that poems don’t have to rhyme, but this is sounding very un-poem-like to me. I wonder if it matters. I wonder if maybe all that matters is that she’s up there.

“Remote viewing is a very powerful tool if used correctly,” she says slowly, enunciating, pausing after every word. “But you need to be sure to use it only for good and not for evil.”

Lawrence shoots his hand up in the air, waves it at Beth Anne. She shakes her head sternly at him, puts a finger to her lips. Rachel looks directly at Lawrence, her eyes fiery, her cheeks beginning to redden as she says, “A lot of people use it for evil.”

It’s definitely not a poem. But still, she’s up there, she’s up there in front of a video camera, and she hasn’t thrown up, or gurgled, or simply stood there staring in a daze, or run screaming from the room. All things, by the way, that I do not rule out for myself. I imagine Beth Anne agrees that it doesn’t have to be a poem, because she doesn’t interrupt Rachel, to tell her, “That is not a poem, dear.” And for the next five minutes, we learn all about Rachel’s belief in the ability we all have to watch people telekinetically. We learn how so many people are actually watching us right now and how even more people are using their telekinetic powers for evil, and terrorism, and, of course, devil worship. And the “of course,” just so you know, that was Rachel’s “of course,” not mine.

What makes it even weirder, even creepier than it already is, simply by virtue of its subject matter, is this: at the end of her non-poem speech, Rachel looks up, over her left shoulder and says, quite calmly, “Scratch that.”

I’m trying not to, but I’m feeling a little scared. I’ve changed my mind, I’ve decided that it does matter, that a poem would have been so much nicer, since that, after all, is what was assigned.

Rachel looks out at us, and says, “Scratch that,” again. After a stunned silence-filled moment or two, everyone starts clapping; a polite, cautious clapping, and so I do, too.

“Um, yes, thank you, Rachel,” Beth Anne says, smoothing down her skirt again as she says it.

“You are welcome.”

“On a scale of one to ten, what was your anxiety level?” Beth Anne asks. Rachel’s eyes, and I’m not making this up, they are all ablaze. I want to raise my hand and say that my anxiety level is pretty freaking high right now, but I try to be respectful of the fact that Beth Anne, right now, is not speaking to me. I wait for the theme from
The Twilight Zone
to start up in the background.

“About a seven,” Rachel says, and looks up over her left shoulder, and walks to her seat.

“Well,” Beth Anne says, exhaling. “I think Rachel did an excellent job of, uh, of, uh, Taking the Room and making eye contact.”

Lawrence’s hand shoots up again.

“Yes, Lawrence?”

“We’re supposed to read a. poem, though, right?”

“Yes, uh, right,” Beth Anne says nodding her head sagely, though with the stammering it seems that she, like me, like everyone else I would venture to guess, is stuck somewhere between slightly and extremely disturbed. “But if you’re not comfortable with a poem, remember we discussed you could read a passage from a book?”

“I thought this was more important,” Rachel offers and everyone looks at the floor.

“Yes, well, interesting topic and good job, Rachel,” Beth Anne says, standing and smoothing down the front of her skirt again, and then smoothing it down one more time.

“Lawrence, who would you like to be your coach?”

I tense up again, because while you’d think Lawrence would pick Rachel because she picked him, you’d also think that maybe he doesn’t want to be remotely viewed and that, along with everyone else, he’s now a little afraid of Rachel.

“Lindsay,” he says, and I relax ever so slightly. Beth Anne ushers Lawrence and Lindsay out into the hall, and the rest of us stare at the floor, and you can almost feel the way everyone is focusing on it now, so intently, much more so than before.

Beth Anne comes back and a few minutes later, Lindsay walks serenely in. After a moment, Lawrence enters the room, and he takes it, too. He perches on the edge of the desk and attempts to maneuver himself so his elbow is bent and his chin is resting in his hand. The angles don’t quite work because of the way he’s perched on the desk, and after a few moments he sits up straight. He tosses his head as if he were shaking a long mane about him, and once again, Takes the Room.

“I’m going to read a little poem I wrote myself,” he tells us as he hooks on the microphone, then spreads his hands out wide to the side again, less jazz hands this time, and more open and welcoming gesture.

“I once saw a little birdie,” he begins.

“A flirty birdie that flew right into a puddle and got all dirty.”

Lawrence pauses, staring blankly into the video camera, for what seems to me like a very long time, and then looks over at Beth Anne, blinking several times very quickly, and asks, “Can I start again?”

“Certainly,” says Beth Anne, and then to all of us, “Class, never be afraid to ask if you’d like to start again.”

“I once saw a little birdie,” Lawrence begins again, and continues speaking confidently all the way through to the end. Except for the actual poem, of course, I think he does excellently.

Afterwards, when Beth Anne asks him, he tells us all that his anxiety level was a five.

Lindsay chooses Lawrence as her partner, and that makes sense to me, and I think how I will not know him any longer as Most-Likely-Gay-Even-Though-He-Wears-A-Wedding-Band-and-Talks-About-His-Wife-Lawrence but from now on only as Very-Good-At-Public-Speaking-Lawrence. Strangely, I feel like I need to take a moment to say goodbye to Most-Likely-Gay-Even-Though-He-Wears-A-Wedding-Band-and-Talks-About-His-Wife-Lawrence, and so, silently, I do.

After another round of exiting, and waiting, and staring at the floor, and looking back up, and watching everyone file back into the room; Lindsay walks slowly in, and up to the front of the room. She seems slightly less meek, actually rather calm, cool, and collected. Her hands don’t even shake as she attaches the lavaliere to the collar of her jacket. She takes a few steps forward from the desk, and clasps her hand behind her back. Her feet are planted firmly as she looks around and Takes the Room in a way that makes me almost understand why rooms should be taken. And then she runs right out of it.

“Okay,” Beth Anne says, walking to the front of the class, to where Lindsay, so calm, so cool, so collected, and so apparently none of those things at all, had just been standing. “We’ll just give Lindsay a moment, see if she comes back.

“Sometimes, class,” she adds on, “people just need a moment.”

I need a moment,
I think. The chain-smoking, moody-black-vintage-overcoat-wearing part of my inner self—the one I try my best not to listen to—is back. She tells me I need a lot more than that.

I stare at Lindsay’s beautiful Marc Jacobs purse and her notebook, over there on her chair-desk, and I wonder if she’s somewhere in the building—in the bathroom throwing up, or in the stairwell desperately practicing The Lion over and over again in the hope that somehow, some way, it might help. Or is she out on the street, having decided that her purse and her notebook are not nearly as high on her priority list as is never having to come back into this room again?

When it’s clear that Lindsay isn’t coming back, Beth Anne turns to Amy. Amy picks Alec as her coach and trudges out the door. It begins to dawn on me that while going last seemed so appealing in the beginning, in the end, it’s more than a little anxiety-provoking. In the end, it seems actually so much worse than having gone already; because then at least the whole thing would be over with.

Amy doesn’t stand up straight, but she does Take the Room in a way that I’d have to say is more threatening than it is confidence-displaying.

“I-I ...” She falters for a moment, and it’s obvious she is scared, and for some reason this surprises me. I never think that people who clearly spend such a great deal of time thinking that they are so cool, actually get scared of the same things that I get scared of. Though I guess I could have been clued in, maybe by the fact that she’s in an
Overcoming Presentation Anxiety
class with me, that sometimes they do.

“I’m going to read a haiku I wrote,” Amy says.

“I am a hot, dark ...” She pauses, stares at the floor.

“Vagina and the world is ...” She pauses again for a little longer, still staring at the floor.

“My yeast infection.” She looks back up, runs a hand through her spiky hair, the index card in her other hand shakes slightly. She doesn’t say anything else, and now it’s even more uncomfortable in the room than it has been before.

Beth Anne speaks up at last. “Well, that’s very evocative Amy.” Amy nods. “But do you think you could read for a bit longer?”

“A haiku is a seventeen-syllable verse form,” Amy says, speaking with quite a bit more authority than she had while reading her haiku. “Five, seven, and five syllables; it can’t be longer,” she explains defiantly, condescendingly.