Violation (16 page)

Antioch Review
, Summer 1997

What is there to write about writing? In a way, there is nothing to say—and yet writers talk and think and write about writing all the time. Steve Tyler and I have been friends for a very long time and have talked a lot about writing—and about not writing—over the years. Long after he'd quit, done, never going to try that again, he was surprised by words. He recently published a book of good poems called
A Hole in the Sun.

     
The Hounds of Spring

MONTHS AGO, WHEN IT WAS DANK AND COLD, THREE
weeks teaching writing to high school students seemed a short enough commitment. In April, it's not so easy. Not on fragrant, mild mornings and warm afternoons full of light. I am the fourth writer in this experimental program funded by a distant foundation, the last visiting writer for the year. I follow a playwright, a poet, and a novelist. Each of us took over the same four classes, the same 110 students, divided between regular freshmen and sophomore honors.

I run into the poet at a party a few weeks after his session ends, and he is sly and self-satisfied. “They're going to eat you up,” he says, with enthusiasm. “You've gotta get right in their faces,” he adds, getting right in my face, “and show them what's what.”

So I call the novelist who preceded me, a mild man with a grown daughter and years of classroom experience. “It's the hardest teaching I've ever done,” he tells me. “And I'll never do it again.”

I'm confident, even in my spring fever. I've taught only adults for several years, but I have three teenagers of my own. I've been rearing children for almost twenty breathless years, and for much of that time I've lived and worked half a block from the big inner-city high school where I'll teach. It's a huge campus, a handsome brick complex covering almost two square blocks next to a city park strewn with the teens' discarded cigarette butts. The campus is “open,” and every day several hundred of the 1,800 students walk by my house on the way to their fast-food lunches and
return a short time later, tossing Burger King and McDonald's wrappers on my lawn. I think I know teenagers and their animal energy—their explosive pleasures, their dark grief, their eternal restlessness, their springs.

The two freshmen classes are full of loud boys and inattentive girls, daring me to interest them. Several set themselves distinctly apart. Anna, heavy and plain, surrounds herself with yards of empty space, crouches behind purple lips and raccoon eyes. Damon is seventeen, making his third and last attempt to pass freshmen English. He is tall and coolly handsome and self-conscious. “I've got a big penis,” he tells me on the first day, when we're doing introductions. Most of the freshmen disappear in the crowd. Pairs and trios huddle together in the back. They call me “Yo!”; they blend together, mouths hanging open when I speak.

The sophomores are calm, obedient, tranquil. Whether this is a difference between freshmen and sophomores, or bonehead English and honors, I'm never quite sure. The sophomores worry about my grading system and call me “Ms. Tisdale.” The young men are lanky out of all proportion, taller than me and quick to blush, easy to praise. Josie and Sandra (“that's Sondra”) have wild hair and long skirts and sit together, self-consciously mature and outspoken. There are dozens of slim, button-nose girls with shoulder-length brown hair and schoolgirl skirts and short-sleeved sweaters. They are all tediously polite.

“The hounds of spring are on winter's traces,” for me as well as them, and I'm surprised at how difficult it is to stand under fluorescent lights in front of this sea of staring faces all day long, these 110 faces all seemingly called Megan or Tyler or K'Shanti. I'm surprised at how difficult it is for me to see each one separate from the others, to meet each one, to simply remember names in the institutional havoc of high school.

Before I started, the classroom teacher gave me a paper listing the six separate schedules used, and a schedule for the schedules; every day before I walk the half-block here, I have to consult my schedule to find out which schedule we're on that day. Sometimes
there are forty-eight-minute periods, and sometimes there are thirty-one-minute periods. Sometimes there are assemblies or faculty meetings, and sometimes the entire school opens two hours late. I can't get used to the giant hive's obeisance to the chaos. It is all so far from the day I keep at home, the long silences and self-determined hours in which I write.

The bells ring and ring, two before and after every class. Bells ring, and the empty halls fill with 1,800 handsome, healthy young people wearing a variety of fashion mistakes, the air thick with sweat, pheromones, and a hundred kinds of tension, like some three-dimensional model of chaos theory. They appear, a human tsunami, and disappear a few minutes later. During class, the phone rings. Unspecified “warning” bells ring. Staff walk in and out of the room, other students walk in and out of the room, carrying messages, asking questions. The daily announcement sheet is delivered. Almost every day, a half-dozen students stand suddenly in the midst of a period and grab their packs. “Where are you going?” I ask, and they say, “Field trip,” or “Track meet,” or “Yearbook meeting,” and leave.

The starting bell rings and they are still wandering in, to find their way into the semicircle of desks, chatting, yelling, shoving each other; they put on makeup, draw cartoons, sleep. Every day Jessica spends sixth period patiently scraping the silver lining out of pieces of chewing gum and rubbing it on to her binder cover, filling her mouth with a wad the size of a baby's fist. When the second bell rings, I walk to the front and they turn mercilessly upon me, like a crowd awaiting the verdict, ready for anything.

My focus for these three weeks is a twisted autobiography, a memoir of their futures, looking back. For the final assignment, I want them to do a short scene from the book they might write when they are old—and it takes days for me to explain this.

First, imagine your future, I tell them on the first day. Any possible future. Outline it. The freshmen stare at me. “How am I supposed to know what's going to happen?” one pretty girl asks, all innocent stupidity. The sophomores want to know how it will
be graded. “What's an outline?” ask several freshmen. “When's it due?” ask the sophomores.

I start again. Imagine your future. From where you sit, I tell them, almost anything could happen. Almost anything. You could be rich or poor, happy or sad. You could become an interstellar traveler, a bum, an inventor, a criminal. What might happen that will affect you? Who will enter your life? What will you choose?

Make an outline, I say, drawing a form on the blackboard, my hands sticky with yellow chalk—events on one side and your feelings about them on the other. Think of love, wisdom, terrible mistakes, illness, luck, learning.

“You mean two outlines?” asks a freshman boy.

“Is this legal?” asks a sophomore girl in the next period.

“Legal?” I ask.

“I mean,” she says, “is it legal to write about something we don't know anything about?”

The next day, a dozen freshmen scratch their heads in bemusement when I mention the outline. “What outline?” goes the chorus—that day, every day that week.

Meanwhile, I have to fill thirty-one minutes, forty-two minutes, forty-eight minutes, four times a day. We do free writing (“What am I supposed to write about?”) and make lists of people who have influenced them, places they've been, things they've learned, and what people and places and skills might come in the future. Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers—less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are—to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word.

They're all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I
know—already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I'm surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot.

Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I'm a million air.” A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year's Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.”

Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children, and giving up—giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.

One girl writes of her future—and I feel this way, too—“Long awaited depression will fall on me, and I will be ready for it.”

FOR THE SECOND
week, while I repeatedly remind them of the chapter they must write and then read out loud, we do exercises. More free writing, more lists. We make a list of childhood play-ground games, a rousing twenty-minute shoutfest, and write scenes about them. We break into small groups. I bring my big box
of crayons and a pad of art paper and have them draw maps of a familiar childhood place and try to remember everything that happened there. “More crayons!” they all shout the next day, and so we draw personal symbols of the future when our social security number will be replaced by logos.

I get to know a few students in the changing crowds. Anna turns in every assignment, speaks up in every discussion. Joseph, with his peroxide blond fade and unreadable neon-orange pen, Joseph who never listens and never shuts up and drives me crazy, seems to genuinely care what I think about his work. Skinny little Hunter, with an opinion on everything, who loves to take the least popular position and start arguments, tells me his parents would be angry if they knew he did something as wasteful as “writing stories.” He sits next to Rebecca, pretty, plump, smart, and they fight constantly. Karen, quiet and self-contained with a perfect silver hoop piercing her left eyebrow, is a strong-minded and clear thinker.

On a quiet Wednesday in the second week, discouraged by the girls' outlines, I talk to the sophomores about self-censorship. I should have done this earlier, I see now; I thought perhaps they wouldn't need it yet, the way adults usually do. I thought maybe they wouldn't understand it—but I was wrong about both things. I make lists on the board about what we're afraid to write about and who we want to please and suddenly everyone is talking at once, Josie and Hunter and Rebecca and even a few of the Megans, tentatively raising their hands, arguing about censorship and offensiveness and politically correct speech, what is obscene, who decides.

But the next day, the real agenda returns. It is almost time to read the stories. The other writers, they tell me, didn't make them read. I'm not making them, I reply, only giving higher grades for it. The other writers read their work for them—I won't. One of the other writers read their work anonymously—I steadfastly refuse.

Instead I buy potato chips and pretzels, jelly beans and red licorice whips and M&M's and come to class on the first read-out-loud day with overflowing grocery bags. The first reader chooses
the first treat, I say, and Isaac surprises me by going first. Isaac is smart, shy, with one crossed eye, and Isaac knocks everyone out with his account of how he fell from grace as world chess champion, became a bum, and finally rose to new fame as a Central Park hustler.

After class, four girls stop me and say all at once, “We can't read!” They can't read, they say, because Isaac's story is so good and theirs are so boring and his is full of adventure and theirs is not. They are afraid to read out loud, fearful of being thought stupid or foolish or—what? I ask them. Girlish? Boring, says one Megan. (Which Megan? I can't remember.) This is a terrible fear, I know—this fear of not being interesting—of being trivial, not special. It is almost as great, I think, as their fear of standing out and being special. I give them a little pep talk, but they aren't consoled.

After a few days of the bravest students coming to stand in front of the class, showing everyone their personal symbol, reading their stories, and then staying put to hear comments, one girl begs me to let her read while sitting at her desk. I list again the reasons why I want her in front: you'll read better standing up; you need to claim your work; you'll be more confident in the end. “Please,” she begs, but I'm tough and say no. Read in front or not at all.

“Slowly, clearly, please,” I say, and one by one they hunch over their papers and read: nervous, sometimes joking, sometimes stiff, smiles plastered on their faces, a few with ripe pimples and big feet, a few blossoming in perfect spring bloom.

And I am surprised again, to tears. There are bad stories, dull stories—and beautiful stories, better than the stories some of my adult students write. I close my eyes and listen to the voices, deep and high, fast and murmured, and sometimes stumbling and thick, and images appear, people in a London flat, a busy airport, autumn leaves skittering across a wet sidewalk, a bitter whispered fight, a sour resignation to mediocrity. The technique seems to leap beyond all they've shown me, the maturity beyond their years.