The Middlesteins(4)
Her roommates were all the same as Robin, more or less. Their names were Jennifer and Julie and Jordan; they were all Jewish, they all had gone to midwestern colleges, and they had all individual secret joint bank accounts with their mothers, who would put a little extra in there every once in a while, so that they could treat themselves to something nice. There was a fifth roommate, who slept in the living room on the couch when she wasn’t sleeping at her girlfriend’s house. She was a brisk girl from Alaska, Teresa, who had grown up in a town of drunks, fighting her way to the middle class while the rest of the roommates did nothing but hover there.
They all had been brought together by the Teach for America program, and then spread out in terrible high schools across Brooklyn. Not quaint Park Slope Brooklyn, where the pretty people with babies lived, but east of there, on the way to racetracks and airports; on the way, it sometimes felt, to nowhere at all. Robin had not been prepared for any of it. Not even after a lifetime of consuming mass culture that told her how messed up schools in impoverished urban areas could be. Not a film or a song or an episode of Law & Order or a class in college or an orientation program had prepared her for how much one year teaching in a school full of at-risk kids was going to suck. If she was seeking hope and inspiration, or if she was thinking she was going to provide it, she was in the wrong place. She was way out of her league. Everyone knew it. She had no poker face. All day long she flinched.
She would wake up every morning and wonder if she was doing more harm than good. She spent money out of her own pocket on paper and markers. She tried to innovate: She covered a large empty tin can (last night’s diced tomatoes for the pasta sauce) with paper and named it the “Hear Me Can” and placed it in the front of the classroom. “When you feel like yelling or you’re upset about something, just write it down and put it in there,” she instructed the children. “And I promise you will be heard.”
After class, she would read the notes. Sometimes it was easy-to-take information.
Someone stole my pencil.
I don’t like tests.
They should have chicken nuggets every day at lunch.
But more often, the missives were hateful or sad.
My father called me a faggot last night.
It’s too loud to sleep in my house.
I hate you I hate these words I hate everyone.
But that wasn’t why she left town, at least not in her memory. There had been an actual, concrete turning point, which had happened near the end of the school year. For a week she and her roommates had woken up covered in bites, at first just a few, but then days later, their bodies, their bellies, their legs, their arms, were covered in red, stinging marks. There was no denying it. They had bedbugs. Teresa was the one who had finally recognized what the bites were and what would have to be done about it. They would have to wash all their clothes in hot water. An exterminator would have to be called. “And you can’t do anything but trash those mattresses,” she said. Who had suggested they burn them first? Was it Robin? Would her mind have gone to destruction so quickly? If she wasn’t the one who said it, she was definitely the one who agreed to it right away.
In an instant, they were all up. They could not live with the bug-infested objects in their lives a moment longer. They kicked their mattresses down the steps. Teresa single-handedly carried the couch herself. They dragged each item through the empty lot, across the gravel, and then to the filthy alley behind their house. Robin ran to the corner deli and bought some lighter fluid. One of the girls had some matches. The other girls picked through the alley for more flammable items: old newspapers, a lampshade, a half dozen dirty pizza-delivery boxes. They all stood there and watched the flames burn the mattresses. Burn those f*ckers right up. They all stood there, scratching themselves. Was this what they deserved? They had taught for America.
Robin examined her mottled arm and said, “Screw this. I’m moving home.”
“Me too,” said Julie.
“Me too,” said Jennifer.
“Me too,” said Jordan.
“Not me,” said Teresa. “I’m moving in with my girlfriend. New York is awesome.”
Now Robin lived with just two roommates (one who was never there because she stayed with her boyfriend most of the time in some sort of undercover, “let’s not offend our Catholic parents even though we’re in our late twenties and are clearly not virgins any longer” gesture, and the other who was always there because she had nowhere better to be, much like Robin) in a spacious apartment in Andersonville, just three train stops away from the private school where she had taught history for the last seven years. Her life in Chicago was better in all the ways she had wanted it to be at the time she moved, although she wondered sometimes if she had left too soon, because she knew that she would never go back. This was it, Chicago. The end of the line.
Because she had a heartsick mother to take care of now.
And where would she have gone anyway, these past few years? No matter where, she would be living the same life as she had in Chicago. Robin would get up in the morning, sip coffee, do a few stretches, run five miles, shower, moisturize, pluck a stray hair from her chin, put on too much eyeliner, and then, before she left, water some plants she cared little for but kept alive out of habit. Then she would take a train or a bus to a school near enough where she wouldn’t spend her whole life commuting, but far enough that she felt grown up—real adults left their homes and went somewhere to work; this was a problem she had with Daniel and his life and taking him seriously—and while she traveled, she would read whatever post-seventies novel she had secured from the library, and she would smirk at the funny parts but never laugh out loud. At school she would teach a class about the Vietnam War and she would get a little political but nothing too outrageous (she was clearly sympathetic with the protesters, but still, We should always support our troops), then have lunch with the one good friend she had made there—whoever the other caustic young single woman was—and they would sit alone together in the cafeteria and make fun of everyone else, students and teachers alike, while always finding something nice to say about them all in the end. Later she would take the train home, perhaps go grocery shopping, buying environmentally sound and mostly vegetarian food items, which she would cook for herself, eat peacefully, reading her book as she ate, using her index finger to follow along, then greet her roommate with a bright smile as she came into the room but then look down again quickly as if she could not be distracted from that exact emotional moment in the book, which was not really a lie, but was also an excuse to be quiet a little longer, to enjoy one more moment in the day that was hers alone. Because later she would go to a bar, with a man or maybe she would meet a man there, and she would practice being a woman, feel some sort of power, suck just enough energy from the man sitting across from her that she would still feel whole and relevant and sexual, without actually having to do anything, simply show up and be there. No one got hurt. She had no interest in getting hurt ever again, or hurting anyone else ever again. It was only a little conversation. Innocent flirtation. Then she would drink what she needed to knock herself out for the night.