Tough Day for the Army (19 page)

“What can I do for you, Josh?” she said without looking up.

“Last week…” I've always been at a loss for words, not able to find the right ones without significant planning and preparation. Even with the weekend to ponder everything she'd been saying to me, I still couldn't figure out what to say.

“Yes?” Her eyes were red-rimmed, like she'd been crying.

“Last week when I said,
estas en amor
instead of
estoy en amor
, you said that was true, that you weren't in love…”

“Yes?”

“Well, what I was wondering is, what about Señor Nuborgen?”

“What about Señor Nuborgen?” Her eyes sparkled. I wondered if I was being teased.

“Don't you love him?”

“Señor Nuborgen,” she said, “is a very nice, thoroughly boring man who was eminently available, and given the current situation, I'm infinitely grateful that I met him.”

“What current situation?”

“I'm not talking about that,” she said.

Not knowing what to say, I lapsed into Spanish, maybe hoping that whatever came out was nonsense. “Esta guapo?”

“No, Señor Nuborgen is not handsome, but then I'm not particularly
bonita
, am I?”

I shrugged. She wasn't. What teacher was? But I wasn't going to say so.

“No,” she said. “I'm no Jennifer Mecklenberg. I guess I never was, but there was a time when I wasn't so bad, if you can believe that.”

I remember trying to really look at her, at who she might've been, but all I saw was what we saw in just about every teacher. Someone old. Someone tired, someone weary. They were like a different species. To us they all looked beaten, defeated, bags under the eyes, living on endless cups of break-room coffee, dragging themselves toward the summer break when they could recharge at least a little, and Señora Nuborgen was no different, though she'd declined more than most over the year.

I tried to look her in the eye. “I can,” I said. Just then the film ran out; the end slapped against the uptake reel. Señora Nuborgen came out from behind her desk and went to the projector. “You're a sweet boy, Josh. Jennifer Mecklenberg would be lucky to have you, particularly compared to that braying ass Andrew Collins.” Switching off the projector, she quickly threaded the end back through the sprocket on the original reel and switched the machine to reverse.

“You know,” she continued, “she and Andrew are having problems.”

“Huh?”

“I heard her crying about it to one of her friends in the bathroom. Seems like he's been stepping out on her at college.”

“Stepping out?”

“He's having sex with other girls.”

It took me a moment to digest the implications of this, the multiple meanings. Andrew Collins and Jennifer Mecklenberg were having problems. Andrew Collins was having sex with other girls.
Other
girls. Jennifer Mecklenberg had had sex. With Andrew Collins.

“Don't look so surprised,” Señora Nuborgen said. “Lots of you are having sex.”

I suppose this was true, but I was not among them, and during class periods as I gazed one row over and two seats ahead at Jennifer Mecklenberg's lovely legs, at the small bones of her wrist, and I imagined gaining the privilege of touching her in those places, my thoughts about her never turned to actual sex. Kissing, of course, maybe a hand on the outside of her cheerleading sweater (maybe even inside), but sex? Ridiculous. Jennifer Mecklenberg was not someone you had sex with. Unless you were Andrew Collins, apparently.

Señora Nuborgen placed a hand on her hip and cocked her head at me. “Not you, though. That seems clear enough.” The movie finished rewinding, and Señora Nuborgen snapped the projector off. She came toward me and rested a hand on my cheek. There was a faint wisp of rubbing alcohol at her wrist.

“We're running out of time, son,” she said.

I have been looking for these love looks on the faces of my students, but I do not see them there. Maybe it's because I teach college instead of high school and these kids are already skilled at masking these things from the likes of me, or maybe my influency at expressing love makes me equally poor at reading it in others.

It's strange even to think of them being in love,
real
love, because they do seem like children to me, especially now that I've realized I'm old enough, biologically anyway, to be their fathers. Of course, some of them must be in
real
love, since they're about the age I was when I met Beth. Maybe it's different for them because these kids do not date; they “hang out” until “hanging out” turns into a relationship. If you ask them, these are their stories.
We were just hanging out and then one day we hooked up.

In our time there was no “hanging out.” There was predator and prey, pursuer and pursued, and while sometimes women were the pursuers and men the pursued, it was usually the traditional way around. Beth likes to tell people how I was dating someone else at the time I started pursuing her, which is shamefully enough true, though I haven't felt any shame over it in a long time. It depends on her mood how she tells it. One version is meant as flattery, a confirmation of our shared destiny together. The other is offered as evidence of my theoretical inconstancy, a floating of the possibility that because I've jumped ship once, I may do it again. She has quizzed me about this other girl, asking me if I loved her.

“Apparently not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I dumped her for you.”

“That doesn't speak so well of your character, does it?” She usually smiles when she says this, but I know this Beth. This is the Beth that asks me if I love her.

Señora Nuborgen was right, we were running out of time, so the next day I no longer pretended I had a reason for staying behind to talk to her. “Looking for a woman's advice, eh, Josh?” she said. She had all the drawers of her desk open and was removing each object, one at a time, conducting a brief inspection before placing some in a cardboard box and throwing away others.

Señora Nuborgen laughed. She held up one of those troll dolls that you stick on the end of a pencil and then twirl to make the hair stand on end. She handed it to me. On the back someone had written “Señora N.” in permanent marker. “Who did this?” I said.

“I don't remember. It was a long time ago.” I handed it back to her. She held it over the box briefly before tossing it into the trash.

“What should I do?” I said.

Señora Nuborgen paused in her sorting. “I'm going to betray my feminist sisters here, Josh, but I'm going to tell you a simple truth. Women like passion. They like romance, and above all they want you to be passionate about
them.
You are quite literally sick with love, my young friend, so we know you don't lack the passion. The question is if you can express it. Do you think you could tell her how you feel?”

“Definitely not.”

“Well, can you show her then?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you can't tell her that you love her, you should show her, make a demonstration of your love. A gesture, a grand gesture.”

“Like what?”

Señora Nuborgen fished a stack of index cards out of the desk and dumped them in the cardboard box. “When I was your age, I pooled my graduation money and went to Spain for three weeks, Andalusia… Málaga, the southern coast.”

None of these things meant anything to me. She may as well have been speaking of Mars.

“I stayed with a host family and spent my days and nights just wandering the city. My Spanish at the time was no better than yours is now, so I kept to myself, soaking it in, dreaming of the day I could come back and understand it all. It's when I decided to major in Spanish. I figured I'd teach during the year and spend my summers in Spain.” Señora Nuborgen took a bundle of pencils bound together with a rubber band and placed them in the box. “I was pretty dumb. I've never been back.”

“Why not?”

“I teach high-school Spanish, Josh. Do you know how much they pay me? Do you think it's summer-home-in-Spain money?”

“Right. But maybe someday…”

“No, not someday, Josh,” she said.

“OK.”

“Anyway,” she said, “there was a boy with a scooter. I saw him on the street outside my host family's home the fourth or fifth day. He had the most beautiful long, dark hair, dark eyes, brown skin. It was the festival month, and no one save the street vendors did any work. They've got the right ideas there, Josh. He wore a short-sleeve button-up shirt that he let flap open in the breeze. He would wait outside for me, holding a helmet under the crook of his arm, and once he saw me make eye contact he'd pat his hand on the scooter seat.”

“What did you do?”

“I ignored him. I was seventeen. He must have been at least twenty. I was a virgin!”

I must have blushed.

“That's right, an innocent young girl being pursued by a swarthy foreigner. Scandal!” She swept her arm blindly into the recesses of the desk, reaching for any straggling objects before continuing. “I even tried changing up my schedule of comings and goings, but he was always there, smiling, patient, patting the seat. I began to dream about him, not always good dreams, like him driving his scooter to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea with me on it. But finally, on my last day, my host mother was sweeping the stoop out front and she saw the boy gesturing to me and I asked who he was and she said,
Él es inofensivo
, he is harmless, and so I went over to the boy and put the helmet on and climbed onto the scooter.”

She was enjoying her own story. I imagine now that it was something she'd never told anyone before, but she'd been rehearsing it in her head for quite some time, waiting for the right moment. “And what happened?” I said.

“We rode. In a day we saw everything it had taken me better than two weeks to experience on foot. It was the same, but faster, a blur. I hugged him tight around the middle and quickly learned to lean into the corners. My Spanish vocabulary was terrible, his English worse, so whenever he said something while smiling I laughed, and whenever his face was straight I nodded seriously. Eventually, as we made a final turn and I realized we were heading for home, I felt deeply sad. Sometimes endings are new beginnings, but this just felt like an ending. I remember leaning my head into his back, pressing my whole self against him. I remember his smell, but I couldn't describe it to you. It is deeper in me than that. As we got closer to the host family home he drove more and more slowly, so slowly we practically tipped over. Back in front of the house, I got off the scooter and faced him as I removed the helmet. My hair was sweat-matted to my face. He took the helmet and swept the hair from my cheeks and pressed his hands to both sides of my face and he tilted my head up and pulled me toward him. I closed my eyes. I had been kissed before, badly, but I was certain this time was going to be different, and I was right.”

She looked at me, and for a moment I thought I could see that girl again, transformed by her own story. She appeared lost for a moment, gazing down at the box holding the keepsakes from her desk. She hefted it briefly before dumping everything from it into the garbage. She continued.

“He pressed his lips to my forehead, and even against my flushed skin they felt warm, but even so, I shivered in his arms. He tilted me back and looked me in the eyes before releasing me, and in an instant he was back on the scooter and gone, leaving me there wobbling in the street. He never said it, Josh,
Te quiero
, but I felt it.”

As I've made clear, my Spanish was not so good, but I knew that word,
quiero.
“But that means
I want you
, not
I love you
,” I said.

“Very good, Josh,” she said. “Exactly.”

When I talk to my students about writing stories, I speak of the importance of showing and telling and how they are inextricably linked, dependent on each other. This is why when my wife asks me if I love her and I say, “of course,” it is not always enough. Sometimes, but not always. It is all tell and no show. I know she would like me to show her, but I'm not sure how, worried that any expression I risk will seem inauthentic. I am simply bad at romance, but not for lack of wanting to try.

Just before Beth and I were married, we had to meet with our officiating minister and declare our intentions. Neither of us were or are churchgoers, so we picked her out of the Yellow Pages, the first one who agreed to marry two people she'd never met, provided we were acquaintances and not strangers to her by the time of the ceremony. I don't remember her name, Reverend something, though I guess I could look it up on the marriage license, but she was a big woman, tall, and she seemed oversized for her small rectory office. She was kind, making small talk before turning to me and asking what she said was the only question that really mattered, “Why do you wish to marry this woman?”

I told her of Beth's best traits, her beauty, her kindness, our shared values, the sense that we belonged together, all true things, but nonetheless a pretty lackluster answer. I even knew it at the time, but the Reverend smiled and nodded at each new thing that came out of my mouth. I spoke for what seemed like forever, I guess hoping that quantity would substitute for quality.

Once I finally petered out, I smiled wanly at the Reverend, then at Beth, and the Reverend turned to Beth and said, “And why do you wish to marry this man?”

Beth reached over and took my hand and looked at me while speaking to the Reverend and said, “Because when he tells me he loves me, I believe him.”

The next day was the last day of school, and all pretense of classroom decorum was discarded completely. The final installment of
Don Quixote
played, but the chattering never stopped. Girls sat on their boyfriends' laps. The kid next to me whose name I cannot conjure for the life of me slowly ripped each page out of his textbook and made paper airplanes that he sailed randomly around the room. Señora Nuborgen was at her desk, blocked by the projector screen in front of her. We were all pent up, ready to explode, and I suppose Señora Nuborgen realized that any effort to contain us was pointless. When Quixote died, disillusioned and alone, some wag went, “Awwwww, that sucks, dude.” The resulting laughter outstripped the actual humor. Everybody but me leaked out of the room before the final bell even rang.