You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [2]
Julia begins to cry. Mazin looks at his desk.
“You know what I believe is important. You know what I’ll say to you about choice, about your lives, about time. You remember, I hope, the discussions we’ve had about “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which was written by whom, Mazin?”
There’s a long pause. “John Keats, Mr. Silver,” he says proudly.
“John Keats.” I smile at him. “You’ll forget most of what we’ve discussed in this classroom. You’ll forget Wilfred Owen and The Grapes of Wrath and Thoreau and Emerson and Blake and the difference between romance and Romanticism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism. It will all become a blur, a swirl of information, which adds to that spreading swamp in your brain. That’s fine. What you must not forget, however, are the questions these writers compelled you to ask yourselves—questions of courage, of passion and belief. And do not forget this.”
I stop. It is very quiet. A locker slams in the hallway. Classes are shortened today and I know the bell will ring soon. I look at them. I mean it all, but teaching is also performance.
“What?” Steven asks. “Dude, we don’t have time. What? Don’t forget what?”
“This. Don’t forget what it felt like. All of us here. What happened in this room. How much you’ve changed since you walked through the door, morons that you were, nine months ago.”
They laugh.
“Thank you. Thank you for all of it.” There is the moment of quiet and then, as if orchestrated, the bell rings.
They stay in their seats. There are other students in the hallways. Lockers slamming closed. I pick up their exams and call their names. They hug me. Mazin first. He pushes the side of his head against my chest. They thank me. They wish me a good summer. I can’t speak. They file out into the hall and disappear into the summer.
It was, I think, my best year.
* * *
That afternoon there’s a barbeque for the faculty. Tables on the grass. A PA playing bad disco meant to be ironic. The kind of thing teachers shouldn’t be listening to at school. Shouldn’t be listening to anywhere. Champagne in plastic cups.
From my office window I can see them collecting around the hors d’oeuvres table. Jean-Paul, who runs the cafeteria, walks around grinning with a tray of kirs. I’m putting off the walk down the stairs and across the grass to the party. I don’t want to pretend to care what they’re doing for the summer. I don’t want to drink cheap champagne and smile. I don’t want to play softball. So I stay in my office and clean out my desk. I file papers—notes from students, parents. Articles I want to save, poems, short stories. I throw away old quizzes, letters from the College Board.
The halls are silent. The last buses have rolled out of the parking lot taking the students away. There are papers and pens lying on the floor, trash cans overflowing, a pile of forgotten clothes, an old lunch rotting in a paper bag, The Catcher in the Rye with its cover torn off.
When my desk is clean—pens in their cup, books lined up, drawers emptied—I walk out into the hall and down the stairs toward the picnic. Nothing left to do. No classes to prepare, nothing to grade, no one who needs to talk.
* * *
Later I sit on the grass with Mia, drinking champagne. She hands me her cup and raises her arms. Released from its pins, her hair spills down her back. Light brown, but now in the sun nearly red. Mia, so calm here, so sure of herself, and so off balance in the city.
Her face in repose falls to a frown and sitting alone in a café she is rarely approached. Only the most brazen strangers talk to her and they’re the least appealing. They frighten and offend her, these men who believe a pretty woman has the obligation to smile, that she owes the world her beauty.
Even the way she pins it, there are always pieces coming undone, strands of hair falling around her neck, grazing her cheek.
We sit with our shoes off. She’s leaning back on her elbows.
“So, that was the year.