Chapter 10
Monday morning: Mr. Tuck stood in front of his 9th grade reading class grateful for the faces and the immediacy of their needs. They were reading “An Open Window” and it was painful for all of them.
Ron said “Close your books.” And then he told them the story of the nervous guest and the imaginative girl who played with his fears and her longings. They listened quietly and understood. Then he said, “Now, I’m going to read it for you.” And then he did and they understood. Then he said, “Let’s go line by line and when we find words you don’t know, raise your hand and I’ll put them on the board and we can see what this is about together.” They did.
It was a two page story but he filled the three panels of the chalkboard once and then he filled them again. He had no time for a dictionary and so he told them what the words meant as he understood them.
He paced down the aisles as they copied everything that he had written. His handwriting frustrated them and so he printed, which only added to the frustration because his printing would lapse into a combination of block and cursive writing and sometimes m’s had three humps and sometimes they just had two. He said that that night they should take the story home and tell it to their families. Tomorrow he wanted to talk about what everyone had said.
“Suppose nobody’s home?’ said Connie DeMatteo
Ron thought for a moment and then said, “Tell the story to yourself like you are somebody else. Imagine that you are somebody listening. That’s what I used to do. My mom was never home and so I’d turn the TV on to a news station and turn the sound down and talk to the face like it was someone I knew.” They all giggled He could be very silly.
After lunch, he met with his senior class. Returning their essays, he thought about what Andrea had written and his response to it. “Poetry can cause an emotional reaction, a deep thought or even a physical response. The power is not in the language alone but in the connection that the reader makes to the language. All by itself, the poem is powerless. It needs you, even more than you need it.” Was it a copout considering the nature of what she had written? He decided that it wasn’t. It was what he could in good conscience communicate to one of his students in a high school.
The class was surprised that he had their essays ready. Rosa said, “Didn’t you go out at all this weekend, Mr. Tuck?”
Ron grinned at them showing them his white teeth and his dimples. “Why would I go out when I could stay at home and read your papers?” he said. They laughed.
“It’s ok,” said Rosa. “Most of us don’t have a life either.”
“Rosa has a life,” chirped Tina. Then she muttered under her breath, “She spends it on her back.” Two or three of the girls closest to Tina began to laugh and Rosa shot the group a hard look that dissolved into a deep smile.
“I know, I know,” said Rosa, “but I just can’t help it.”
“How is Beowulf a story about people who are partying too hard?” asked Ron.
“These men don’t do anything but brag about themselves,” said Tina.
“Why do you think that?” asked Ron.
Tina was thoughtful then she said, “Look at the way that they go on and on about themselves. They have more titles for each other that there are grains of rice in a Carolina box. It’s all exaggeration. They just exaggerate everything.”
“Why would they do that,” said Ron.
The class was silent. He waited. He liked it when they were quiet like this. It meant that they were thinking. It scanned their faces trying the read their thoughts. Ron’s mind was running full speed. They had been right of course, but Lashly had taught him that it was easy to put characters down and that it was important to learn to defend literature. How could he teach them that? How had Lashly taught it to him? Ron thought, by doing it. He taught me that it should be important by how important he made it to himself. That wouldn’t work on these kids. There were too many other things competing for importance in their lives. But Rosa had said that some of them didn’t have lives either. Ron smiled to himself about the “either” as he paced around the room rolling chalk between his palms, listening to the way that it clicked on his ring. He looked down at the Minnesota Jasper that Robin had given him the day that he’d arrived in Minneapolis. “This is for getting your ass out of New Jersey,” she said to him.
Then an idea hit him. “When I was growing up around here reputation was really important. For girls, it meant that you couldn’t have dated too many guys and for guys it meant it mostly had to do with how tough you were.”
Rosa whispered to Andrea, “Or how big a dick he has.” Andrea laughed.
Ron ignored them. “Why would a guy want a big reputation?” said Ron. Rosa and Andrea burst out laughing. This time Ron turned to them. He walked straight towards Andrea not realizing that at their seated height they were right at cock level. The girls laughed harder. “Come on,” said Ron, “stay with me here. Why is it important to have a reputation for being a tough guy?”
“So that people won’t try to step on you,” said the girl looking up at his face and seeing his green eyes very intently looking first at her and then at Rosa and then at the rest of the class.
“Why would it be any different for them?”
“Because they were like from biblical times. Everything was different,” said Barbara, a chubby girl who shifted from side to side in her seat as she spoke.
“Maybe some things don’t change,” said Ron. “Maybe that’s why it is important to read this stuff to see that some things don’t change.”
Rosa said, “Does that mean that after we learn that some things don’t change that we can stop reading this corny stuff and read something that is interesting?”
The class laughed. Ron laughed too. Rosa was right. It was kind of boring but he didn’t think that their studying it had to be boring, not if he could make them see the connection between them and it. “All these people thinking about a lot of the same things that you and I are thinking about. Maybe they’ve thought of some things that we haven’t. Maybe some of them were smarter than us and we can learn from them.” Ron hesitated. It wouldn’t do any good to scold them, not yet. He hadn’t hooked them deeply enough yet. He needed to lure them in just a little more first. “When does the monster appear?”
“At night,” said Tina quickly.
“What have they been doing before the monster comes into the mead hall?”
“Sleeping,” said Andrea.
“And before that?”
There was the silence again Ron sent them back to the book, to the story. The read together about the first time that Grendel had appeared. Then he sent them to another section and another.
“They’ve always been drinking,” said Ron finally. “What do men do after they’ve been drinking?”
The girls laughed. Rosa said, “They pee.” The girls laughed again.
Laughing with them, Ron said, “What else do they do?”
“They get all hot,” said Rosa loudly. The girls laughed very hard now.
Ron said, “And what do they do after they get hot?” Then he blushed realizing that they would take it differently from the way that he meant it. Rosa said in a mildly mocking voice, “Mr. Tuck, you don’t want us to talk about that.”
“Do they ever fight?” said Ron. The room got very, very quiet. “Could people sometimes get hurt?” The room was so quiet now that he could hear his own footsteps as he paced back and forth in front of the room. “Maybe this is a story about the monsters that come out from inside of men after they’ve been drinking too much. These were violent men. Men who were used to killing and fighting. Is it any wonder that if you put a bunch of them together in a bar, that someone would get hurt?” And then almost as perfect punctuation to what he said, the bell rang. He smiled. His timing was getting better.
Ron got into his car and drove back towards his house. His mind was still back with his classes. He could see their open faces and their deep, dark eyes like they were indelibly printed somewhere inside of him. He asked himself for at least the tenth time if what he was trying to do was any good for them. Did he have anything that he could really give them that was any different or better than what the other teachers had to offer? They looked at him with faith in their eyes. They trusted him, or at least it seemed to him that they trusted him. Suppose he fucked it up? Suppose some Catholic thing just made him go off and somehow they were taken away from them. He would be just another in what he knew to be a long list of disappointments for them. He couldn’t let that happen. If he had to pretend to still be a Catholic, he would. Then another voice said inside of him said, “They’re just kids. Who are you, the fucking Catcher in the Rye?” He screamed back at the voice that he was sane. That he would battle for his sanity. That he would not let himself go crazy again. It was giving up. He didn’t want to give up on them and he didn’t want them to know how quickly, how completely, he wanted to be part of their lives. He wanted to be a teacher that they would smile about when they were older and to do that he had to give up some things and be there for them now. Nothing that he had ever done was as important as what he was doing right now, and he would not allow himself to let them down.
Back at his apartment, he found a note from Zoe that said that she had taken the train back to her father’s house. Ron noticed that she never called it her parents’ house. It was always her father’s house. He missed not having her there and yet he didn’t want to miss her. He had learned to be alone again. Robin had taken that away from him and he had it back now. He could be alone without waiting for someone to call up and save him. It had been so hard without the aid of being a kid who could have imaginary friends and games. What he had now was music and pot. He rolled a joint and turned on the radio. He lit the joint and sat next to the fan so that the smoke would be sucked out into the alleyway. He sat back in his Danish rocking chair, one of the two chairs that he had taken from his Aunt Dottie’s house after she died. He looked over at the place of honor that he gave her fan back chair. He didn’t sit in it as much as he stared at it and imagined her when he did. She wouldn’t like these kids. She would think that he was wasting his time and that they didn’t pay him enough money.
The phone rang twice before he moved towards it. He expected to hear Zoe’s voice but it wasn’t Zoe. Robin said, “I was thinking about you and wondering how you were.”
In a stunned voice, he said “I’m teaching in a little Catholic school in Newark.”
Robin laughed. “Are you pretending to be Warren?”
“I think that I can do this, Robin. These kids grew up on the same streets that I grew up on. I can help them to learn what they need to learn to get out.”
“So, you want to save them?”
“I don’t know. I wish that you could see what happens to me when I’m in class. It’s very strange and kind of wonderful really.”
“Are you smoking pot again?”
“Not so much,” said Ron, stubbing the joint out in his ashtray.
“I’m coming back for a visit.”
“When?”
“In three weeks.”
“How long will you be staying?”
“I haven’t decided. Can I count on you to pick me up?”
“You can always count on me. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Things change.”
“Yeah, they do,” he said. She was fully alive in his mind now and he could see her face so very clearly, the high cheekbones, the blonde straight hair, and the blue eyes that saw everything.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“No,” he lied.
“You should see other people, Ron.”
“I want to see you.”
There was what seemed like an incredibly long silence over the phone line.
“I’ll call you again when I know when I’m getting in.”
“OK,” said Ron. And then she was gone and he was alone in his one room apartment in Elizabeth and the radio was annoying him and he felt very lonely. He picked up his book bag and began to prepare for the next day’s classes. He relit the joint and in a while it felt as if he must have imagined that she had called.
It was dark when the phone rang again. This time it was Zoe and her voice sent a wash of guilt that felt like a cold shower run through his mind and then down over his body.
She said, “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”
He said, “I had to work.”
“Is it too late to come and get me?”
Ron broke into a grin and said, “I’m half out the door already.”