Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (7 page)

Ebony whipped up from her seat and backhanded her, strands of Foxy Black slapping across Lynnea’s face. Chairs clattered to floor, students stood, screaming like cheerleaders.
“Shit!
Did you see that! Ms. Davis got
banked
!”

Lynnea felt her face. No blood. Barely a sting. The girl was gone. Lynnea blinked slowly, then walked out of the classroom. Behind her the class had become a noisy party, and ahead of her, a few yards down the hallway, she saw Ebony make the corner—a flash of short skirt, yellow plastic go-go boots, a trail of fake hair. She heard the squeak of sneakers and knew half her class was on its way down two flights of stairs and out the massive doors.

L
YNNEA WROTE
out a suspension sheet for Ebony, though no one in the school could track the girl down to give it to her. When
the final bell rang, Mr. Morocco, the principal, sat down with Lynnea in her empty classroom. In low, clear tones, he spoke about the need for “greater classroom management.” Then he left, closing the door the way a parent might after grounding a child.

Alone in her classroom, Lynnea thought of Charlesetta Flew, the history teacher down the hall who carried a dish towel to wipe sweat from her face. She was a stocky, penny-colored woman, her looks reminding Lynnea of her quiet aunt Selma, but when a student so much as whispered in Ms. Flew’s class, Charlesetta Flew threatened to sit on them. They believed her and sat at their desks with the solemnity of pieces on a chessboard.

Mrs. Flew would laugh at Lynnea, how Lynnea approached the chalkboard crabwise, afraid that if she turned her back to write anything on it, the students would rearrange their desks. Or a student might just up and leave, or curse her out. Or hit her.

Without quite knowing what led her, Lynnea made her way past a sprinkling of after-school students in the lime green halls, nearly slipping on confetti left over from a pep rally before finally reaching the main office. She plunked her quarter in the normally broken pay phone and called Bonza, who promised to meet her as soon as he could.

She waited outside for Bonza in the gray weather. The front of the school was deserted and the four skimpy trees that dotted the dirt-packed school lawn evaded any pretense of bright New Englandesque fall colors, heading straight to dried-out beige. She could just make out the thunk and dribble of a basketball game getting started on the far eastern side of the school. The boys preferred to primp on the basketball courts where teachers would be less likely to catch them smoking blunts packed with weed. Lynnea had seen—and smelled—them once, watching the boys swirl and fake each other
out. Most of the audience comprised girls she’d seen leisurely walking the halls. They wore their makeup like stains, propped themselves against the school walls, yelling names and dares and sexy invitations. But no one loitered where she waited on the school’s front steps, the wind making her eyes water.

Bonza drove up in a Pinto that looked like it had been dipped in acid. He rolled—then pushed—down his broken car window.

“Having problems?” Bonza drawled. He lit a cigarette and slammed the car door. His head bobbed up and down, as if in agreement with himself. “Thought you said you’d seen some tough times.” He began to walk the perimeter of the school and she followed.

“They mill around whenever they want, they won’t shut up, they—they couldn’t care less about—I mean, when you’re teaching, don’t you ever see a—light in their eyes?”

The Baltimore Public School System ran a series of Vaseline-smeared camera shots of students eagerly raising their hands to answer questions, students traipsing through fields to release butterflies into the wild, smiling students clad in black graduation robes, a teary-eyed teacher, beaming from the front row. In each of these shots, the camera zooms in on one student, until their eyes are the size of fists on the television screen, with a twinkling star of light flashing through each retina.

“A light?” Bonza covered his mouth with his hand, then doubled over in an exaggerated bow, and when he finally came up, his hair flew back like that of a Labrador flicking off the waters of a mountain stream.

“Ohhh boy.” Bonza shook his head.

Lynnea felt her eyes narrow on him. “What’s so funny?”

He regarded the burning ash, turning serious. “Maybe,” he said,
“you became a teacher for all the wrong reasons, hon. Maybe you just don’t care enough about them.”

“Listen,” Lynnea said. “I care. It’s the students who don’t care.”

“All right. So they don’t care. Whaddya do?”

She knew this was one of his little tests. She stuttered, but didn’t answer. He snapped his fingers to signal she was out of time and smiled his disapproval. She’d expected him to come up with one of his handy one-liners about teaching—
teachers don’t teach, they coach;
dilemmas aren’t solved, they’re managed
—but all he said was:

“Robert the Cop quit teaching.”

Lynnea looked at him. “Doesn’t surprise me,” she said.

“Yeah. He’s a cop down in his blood.” Bonza seemed to lament this, and she could see why: during Robert the Cop’s role-play as teacher that summer, all the adults pretending to be students in his class pulled the same antics they’d pulled in other role-plays. But Robert the Cop never lost his composure. He gave them all detention, goose-stepping to each pretend student, pounding his fist on their desks for quiet. He ended by telling them they were all sorry motherfuckers, said they’d all amount to nothing, zero, zilch, nada, if they didn’t respect authority.

Before he began teaching school, Robert took night shifts so he could attend his classes during the day. After his turn at role-play teaching, he drove to a black part of town called Hollander Ridge and parked his unmarked Mazda at an intersection where the traffic lights never worked.

“Yep. I nabbed ’em,” he admitted the day after he’d given the tickets. “I needed to get my quota.” He’d handed out eleven speeding tickets and three vagrancy charges. Fourteen in all. “Payback.”

Lynnea knew it was revenge on the fourteen pretend students
who’d given him hell in role-play, and she somehow felt complicit, as though she’d had the power to stop him but didn’t.

“It’s better that he quit.” Bonza leaned toward her, his black hair battered by the wind. “Robert didn’t have the heart for it. Not like you, hon.”

The wind jerked the four trees of the schoolyard until it gathered a shower of dead leaves to carry away; it swung open the flaps of Lynnea’s cheap green jacket so hard the lapels hit her face. She could see Bonza’s eyes scanning the school steps: no students. He threw his cigarette to the concrete, snuffed it out with his shoe, then grabbed her, kissing her with full, sloppy thrusts of tongue, his mustache scrubbing her face with its bristles. Lynnea pushed him away and gasped for air, trying to wipe away the saliva ringing her mouth, only to find both hands locked solidly in Bonza’s.

“C’mon. Let’s blow this joint.”

“Joint?
I’m sure you have to get back home to your wife.” She used the steady bad-ass eyes she’d practiced in the mirror for her class. Bonza chucked his head to the side as though his wife were some sort of poem he’d read, hadn’t understood, and had dismissed.

Lynnea tried to pull away, but couldn’t. “No,” she said. “And I mean it.”

Bonza let go and looked at her as though he was tired and she was keeping him from getting his sleep. “Listen. Do you wanna learn all the right tricks or what?”

T
WO WEEKS
after the Bonza incident, Lynnea got a new student. The guidance counselor, Mr. Knight, handed her a thick, bulging folder.

“Sheba Simmons. Those are all her records, transfers.”

As Lynnea glanced down at the heavy folder, the guidance counselor whispered into her ear, “She knifed a teacher at her old school.”

“Yippee,” Lynnea said.

A girl walked into the office. She was over six feet tall and the legs under her miniskirt looked like those of a bodybuilder.

“Are you my new student?” Lynnea asked.

“Question is, You my new teacher?”

Mr. Knight pulled Lynnea outside the office and gave her the rundown on Sheba: Sheba did not live with a family but in a home for girls. Every afternoon a bus with iron grillework on the windows was going to pick her up, take her to Hollander Ridge. According to Mr. Knight, the place was a large formstone building with
OUR LADY OF PEACE
in bas-relief above the entrance.

Before Sheba entered the classroom, Lynnea told everyone that they would have a new student, and as soon as she said the name “Sheba,” Terra Undertaker howled, “Sheba. That a
dog’s
name!” The class began to bark wildly in various pitches, ranging from Chihuahua to Doberman.

When Sheba stepped into the room, the barking trailed off to nothing. Sheba sat in the chair closest to Lynnea’s desk, took out her notebook and pen, eyed the board, and began copying the day’s notes. No one moved, Lynnea included. Sheba, sensing that it was a bit too quiet, turned her head around to the class.

“Why y’all all back there?”

Lynnea didn’t know what she was talking about until she noticed that the desks and seats had traveled to the back half of the room, leaving her and Sheba in the front.

“Everyone,” Lynnea began, using her orchestra-conducting voice, “move your desks forward.”

A few pushed their desks, but that was it. Five students had come forward. Sheba stood and scanned the classroom.

“Y’all hear the woman! The woman say
move
!”

Desks clattered, seats edged across the tiled floor with persistent fart noises, girls dragged large fake designer handbags behind them like migrant workers told to flee the land. Sheba flitted her eyes as though all of this wasn’t quick enough for her, but would suffice. The students sat straight in their desks, not daring to speak. Sheba sat back down slowly, primly smoothing down her short skirt against her thighs before edging into her seat. Lynnea stood. The silence lasted almost a full minute. Finally, Sheba looked at Lynnea and said, “Is you gone teach us or what?”

V
ENUS WAS
raking the same patch of leaves over and over. The leaves leapt from the broken prongs of the rake and settled back to where they’d originally lain. “Hello,” Lynnea said. “Venus. Venus? Hello?”

“Oh.” Venus turned, still raking. “How you doing?”

“Fine. Teaching. You know how that goes.”

“Ohhhh do I. They all crack babies. None a them’s got a bit a sense to them. Ought a skip schooling and send them all to the military.”

Without looking up from the leaves she said, “So. When you say you was moving out?”

I
N THE
following weeks, they finished reading
Their Eyes Were
Watching God
and moved on to
The Great Gatsby.
The class was quiet with Sheba in it. If a student began to talk, Sheba would stand and
say, “Y’all need to shut up and learn something.” Everyone would remain seated.

One day after school, Lynnea lifted her head from its defeated position on her desk and found a pair of eyes staring at her, as though she were a problem Sheba was trying to solve.

“Miz Davis, I got to talk to you.”

“Yes,” Lynnea said, glancing at the clock.

“We can’t go on like this. I mean, nobody want to learn about no metaphors and symbolisms and—I don’t know what all.”

“Well, that’s what we have to learn for exams.”

“
You
don’t have to learn nothing. We the ones—”

“Anything,” Lynnea corrected.

“What?”

“Go on.” Lynnea sneaked another glance at the clock.

“Maybe we can learn it, but not by you just yapping at us. Nobody wanna hear nobody else talk for no hour. It just get boring. Maybe we could act out some of the book, like a soap opera or something. Or when people wanna say their opinions, like a talk show.”

So they tried the soap operas and talk shows in class.

“I still think Myrtle is a ho and Daisy—” Jerron searched the ceiling for words. “If she tried that shit—I mean stuff—where I live, some guy woulda clocked her long ago.”

“But you gotta understand,” Ramona said, “them was white folks, back in the twenties, when they just had invented cars. Daisy didn’t even know she’d run Myrtle over. They just did stupid shit like that.”

“All right,” Lynnea said. “Could you quit it with the cursing? We’re not on the streets.”

“I don’t live on no street!” an anonymous voice piped up.

In return, Sheba glared at the class and said, “If you don’t
live
in no street, then don’t
act like
you live in
no street
!”

The class was absolutely silent. Lynnea felt awkward and feeble breaking the silence. “Thank you, Sheba. Very well put.”

The rest of the class they discussed
The Great Gatsby
with the quiet reserve of golf commentators describing a stroke. When the bell rang, they shambled out of the room quietly, but Sheba stayed.

Though class had ended well, it had still been a long day. Lynnea slumped over her desk, forehead resting on a pile of ungraded homework.

“Well,” Sheba finally said, “they read the book. They understand. That’s what you gotta keep in mind.”

Lynnea raised her head and slowly nodded in reply, though Sheba was gone.

For a few weeks things went well. She was finally finishing her copying and lesson planning early enough to leave when the other teachers left; she was finally able to pack up her lessons and leave the building before the janitors kicked her out. Before Sheba, she used to spend at least an hour at her desk, paralyzed, recovering from her day. Now when she passed the school basketball court, she smiled and waved.

T
HEN
S
HEBA
stopped coming to class regularly. When she did come, she would smack her lips, occasionally casting a feeble glance Lynnea’s way. One day when Lynnea was trying to explain etymologies to the class, the class grew noisier and noisier, books scattered on the students’ desks, wads of papers strewn about the floor. Lynnea couldn’t even hear herself speaking; the room sounded like a football arena, everyone talking—all save Sheba, who’d come to class after three weeks of spotty attendance. Sheba sat in her chair, the cuffs of her too-small rabbit fur jacket starting way past her wrists. In the
midst of the noise and confusion, Sheba surveyed the scene, arms folded like a cigar-store Indian.