Transference
by Allison Gruber I tell them not to throw pretzels across the room. We devise a class-contract stating that it is rude and unacceptable to “take paper out of someone’s hands while they are writing.” I scold two boys for conspicuously passing a Cheez-It during workshop. I catch a girl teaching her peers how to “French kiss,” lasciviously licking the back of her own hand. I field convoluted, unsolicited anecdotes about their parents’ faltering marriages, tales of impossibly fabricated weekend activities, grotesque details about contagious illnesses, I puked three times yesterday. They are pungent, random, fidgety, stream-of-consciousness in extremis. They enjoy being read to; girls absently spin strands of hair around their fingers, boys relax into slack-jawed focus. They become pliable, tender. I read to them whenever I can. I’m reading from “Flowers for Algernon,” and a twelve-year-old girl interrupts. Why does the character have a rabbit’s foot in his pocket? The other students look up. It’s a superstitious thing, I say. People believed they were good luck. And I remember them myself – dyed yellow, blue, soft and solid under my thumb. They sold them in gumball machines, I add. With spider rings, and bouncy balls, and, you know, gumballs. Their mouths drop, as though I have arrived from another dimension to shock them with the peculiarities of my world. So they chopped the feet off rabbits and put them in gumball machines? Another kid blurts, horrified. Well, yeah, I guess they did – That’s horrible! A more precocious female student exclaims. That’s so wrong, Ms. Gruber! I didn’t come up with the idea – But did you buy rabbit’s feet? She is accusatory, self-righteous. I did buy rabbit’s feet, at the K-Mart just beyond the Cold-War-Era-Nike-Missile-base-turned-arboretum. Day-glo jelly bracelets, gum in the shape of cigarettes, Blue Icees, rabbits’ feet. I’m sure I had a few, I admit. A boy who is obsessed with diabetes and Maine offers that his dad told him about animal experimentation, He said they only do it on old animals that are about to die -- The indignant girl turns her scorn on him, Oh! That’s just great! So if your grandpa is sick, then it’s okay to experiment on him – The topic implodes. They love animals; they are horrified by the commodification of rabbits’ feet, disgusted by my admission, shocked by the erroneous assertion that animal experimentation is conducted only on the “old, sick” animals. I shout over the cacophony. Yo, folks! Listen up! Focus! Before this, I was out of work for six months. I’d never been so unemployed. My terminal degree and ten years of college teaching experience made menial jobs impossible -- my MFA as helpful as a felony record where Home Depot, coffee slinging, and data entry positions were concerned. For six months, I was a string of abstract nouns. No one taught me to teach. Every pedagogical approach I have ever had, a result of experiments and mimicry of teachers I admired: the frenetic high school teacher who played Led Zeppelin in Biology, the no-nonsense warmth of the woman who taught me how to spell “loquacious,” the sturdily rigorous intellectual musings of female college professors on whom I developed excruciating crushes. In classrooms, I was always a verb: shattering or dying or falling in love. Therapists call it transference. There is no equivalent word in education. They used to call these loathsome years “junior high”: my small, sore tits, my scraped knees, my crooked teeth, my ink stained backpack. They tried to make an athlete out of me, a pretty girl out of me, a heterosexual out of me, a Catholic out of me. Call it “junior high,” call it “middle school,” no one pines for these sticky, cruel years. My students guess my age – somewhere between twenty-two and fifty. They compliment my red Converse. They discover I am from Chicago: Can you tell the difference between a firecracker and a gunshot? Have you been to the Sears’ Tower? All the way to the top? Why are you here now? To the latter, I state simply, frankly, “I got married,” as though all married people live in Arizona. They speculate on the topic of romantic love. For them, love is a matter of extremes: unimaginable bliss, exquisite destruction -- the whole thing an incomprehensible event, a blurry figment of their adolescent imagination. They furtively exchange bits of misinformation about the high-schoolers they’ve seen holding hands in the hall, name drop teenage couples -- Norah and Jake, they say. David and Maya. The references are somewhat esoteric, and the kids who don’t know dare not ask for fear of extensive, condescending, back story. They are afflicted by back story; back story is a condition from which they suffer. In medias res, I write on the board. That’s Spanish! Blurts a girl who recently wrote a story about a creature that was part lizard, part rainbow, and part bucket. In the middle of things, I say. Latin. Start in the middle of things. They are skeptical of this approach, and I will die of boredom if they don’t embrace it. Start where things are now, I implore them. Start with the exact moment. Start where the character presently finds herself. Start with the classroom, the borders of this square state your teacher couldn’t accurately find on a map until she knew the name “Sarah.” Look out the window, see the mountains, start with the age the peaks are now, snow capped and sharp like terrain manipulated into a beer ad. Start with your current longing for lakes. Start with the shards of memory wedged between the folds of your brain, bookmarks for the fears you return to again and again, but not right now. Start with the staggering swiftness of love, the heart’s worn token thumbed as it dangles on a frail chain. Start with your weird, dumb luck. |
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