Eye to Eye (14 page)

“You're kind of scary like this, Toni.”

“You have no idea.” Toni smiles. “I didn't say it was pretty or true, I'm just trying to get your overly analytical little academic arse in the nude condition as quickly as possible. It's called friendship.”

I give her a hug, and she leaves to work on her writing. That she used the word
friendship
makes me happier than just about anything that's happened to me since I arrived in Atlanta.

I decide to take Toni's advice, but instead of writing Maxwell back immediately, I decide to do a reverse search of sorts, and check to see what other women my age—my competition as it were—are looking for in a man. Could it be that my brain has been seriously warped by years of gender theory and dating of the über-politically correct? I know from my conversations with Paige that it's entirely
possible
for young women to reject feminism, and not just the name, but the actual ends. If scads of women view marriage as the chance to sit on one's ass and be cared for, who's to say that women aren't devolving, putting Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, not to mention Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi, to shame. It hurts my head to think about it, since women disidentifying with feminism seems to me the equivalent of African-Americans looking at the civil rights movement and deciding that it really didn't do that much.

Here is what I learned about single women and Internet dating in general.

1. These ladies have gone to Glamour Shots. Seriously. I will be changing my cute and candid picture in the very near future.
   
2. Toni has clearly done her research. Passivity in the female subject is alive and well. It's not so much the occasional girl who says she “wants a prince,” as the sheer volume of girls who describe themselves as “down to earth,” who want a “nice” man who likes “to treat a woman right.” There are ladies aplenty who announce up front that they'd like to settle down, or they like to party, but very little that reveals a sentient being with unique and independent thoughts. And women, too, love that
   DaVinci Code,
   though there's a healthy smattering of Oprah book-club picks for variety's sake.
   
3. Overall, the women are pretty much EXACTLY like the men in most respects. Generic and slightly depressing. Testament to the self-Stepfordization of America. I will no doubt be haunted and horrified well past this moment by the woman who “loves the news, but only FOX News.” It's like thousands of versions of the exact same person looking for the exact same things. Scary. Very, very scary.
   
4. And perhaps this goes without saying: it will be a miracle if I meet anyone through this venue.
   

Mid-September in Atlanta is still summer. If I ever deigned to visit the gym near my apartment, I have a sneaking suspicion this is how the steam room might feel. In the short time it takes for me to cross the two blocks from the parking garage to my office, I can feel the back of my once-crisp white blouse (button-down with a Peter Pan collar—thank you, Anthropologie sale rack!) plastered against my back, sweat dripping beneath my cropped brown pants. The outfit would be women's-club conservative, but I'm wearing a no doubt inappropriate pair of red shoes, a half inch too high to be strictly professional, but not so high as to be overtly trampy. At home, I thought the outfit screamed sex and money. Now it simply screams for antiperspirant.

On the way to teach world literature, I pass Asa in the hall, who is wearing a similarly conservative outfit, but with well-worn, beige leather sandals that scream professional and practical. She gives me the once-over, but withholds comment. This is the single tangible advantage to being the resident poet, from those Byronic blouses to the always-in-season Dickensian white: no one has ever expected those skilled in verse to dress like normal people. I vow to stop by her office later and make a second pass at making friends.

Making the transition from graduate student to professor is similar to moving from engaged to married. Everything about you is technically the same, but somehow the formalization makes everything different. It's not that I know more than I did a scant four months before, but my students treat me with respect. No more of that “where's our real teacher” nonsense that so riddled my experience at Langsdale. In Atlanta, it's all polite smiles and “okie-dokie, Miss-I-mean-Dr. Weatherall.” I take that back. Aside from Paige Prentiss, it's all okie-dokie.

Paige is now in all three of the classes that I'm teaching this semester: advanced poetry writing, American lit and world literature. Initially, she was only in two, but I think she's become the Lex Luthor-ette to my Super-prof—she hates me, but it's clearly a fascinated kind of hatred. In poetry writing, she's a regular shark and on her way to becoming the real deal. She's what teachers call “gifted.” In possession of a turn of phrase that seems almost beyond her control. Her metaphors are consistently surprising, her critical eye astute, and yet she refuses to write about anything more troubling than an unweeded garden and a slightly untrainable boyfriend. In world lit, she plays dumb. This is almost entirely due to the presence of Jack Moynihan, a generically handsome, deeply mediocre but good-hearted student whom Paige seems desperate to impress. Jack reminds me of the young version of every half-datable man with a profile on the Internet. He all but cries for a women who loves her dog, country, God and man, but not necessarily in that order. And Paige is far more interested in impressing him with her awe-gee-shucks stupidity than she is in stunning me with her smarts.

Today we are reading
July's People,
a provocative novel by Nadine Gordimer about the dissolution of a white South African family in the wake of some fictitious revolution that reverses the terms of apartheid. The white “masters” find themselves at the mercy of their black African servant, July, and the identity of all is in flux. I came prepared with a timeline of South African history, and an explanation of the roots of apartheid, as well as its perpetuation well into the 1990s. I've long since given up on expecting students to know history when they arrive in a college classroom. Hell, Ronnie taught a class at Langsdale where not one student knew what the color lavender looked like. Out of eighteen students, nary a soul had heard of lavender and associated it with a pastel blue-purple. In fact, one of the students finally ventured, “It's like the color of blood, right?” To which Ronnie responded, in one of her few losing-the-cool moments, “Do you all live under rocks?” That was the only semester that Ronnie had less-than-stellar teaching evaluations. No one likes feeling stupid.
Especially
stupid people.

Out of my class of twelve, one student had heard of apartheid before reading the book. James Jackson, a deeply Republican African-American student, who objects to any swear words he finds on the page. Asa taught him in American lit, and evidently Jean Toomer's
Cane,
a Harlem Renaissance classic, was too sordid for his taste. Paige Prentiss kept her mouth shut, and the rest of the class scribbled notes as I gave a general overview of colonialization in Africa, and the legacy of apartheid in South Africa today.

“When I was in college, not quite the Stone Age, as you might imagine, all of this was still taking place. People wore T-shirts that said ‘abolish apartheid, divest now,' and there was a famous video where a number of musicians sang a song where the refrain was, ‘I ain't gonna play Sun City.'”

James nods. Paige looks at her nails. Jack Moynihan seems oddly engaged.

“What do you mean by
divest?
” he asks.

“Good question. It means that countries like the United States, which tacitly supported the white South-African government by investing in the country, were encouraged to pull out their financial assets, thus weakening the country's economy, and also sending out a moral message.”

And maybe this is where I should have stopped. Looking back, perhaps this was the moment to leave it at a history lesson, but pre-Marc-Jacobs-obsessed-ex-college-commie in me just couldn't help herself. I wanted to make some link between the past and present, or as I was to learn later, “to bring politics into the classroom.”

“In fact,” I say, “a number of people in this last election objected to Dick Cheney, our vice president, because he not only supported investment in South Africa, but opposed a bill supporting the ANC, or African National Congress, and voted against a resolution to free Nelson Mandela from imprisonment.” And now I was getting pissed. “He even went so far as to call Nelson Mandela a terrorist, which in my book is tantamount to calling Martin Luther King a terrorist.”

Jack pursed his full lips and ran one hand across the front of his too-tight blue T-shirt. “Is that true?” he asked. “About the vice president?”

“Look it up,” I tell him.

Paige Prentiss made a tsk-tsk sound. “Maybe it's true, but I don't see how it relates to anything going on in the book. I think we're supposed to be talking about
July's People
, not Dr. Weatherall's liberal agenda.”

“It's not my liberal agenda,” I said, equal parts shocked and awed at her nerve. “It's history, and it's relevant. There's not always a clear separation between literature and politics. Look at the former Soviet Union, heck, look at America today. Poetry teachers at public high schools have lost their jobs for allowing students to write anti-war poems. Sounds awfully like fascism to me. And it's not like I'm making this up about the vice president, he's gone on record to say that if he had the chance, he wouldn't have changed that vote. I don't know about you, but that infuriates me. Now maybe
that'
s not relevant to this class, but where are we if we can't have an open dialogue, if we can't start on one place in the world, say South Africa, and investigate how it is or is not analogous to other situations? Civil Rights and black consciousness weren't such unrelated movements.”

Maybe Paige was just trying to goad me, or maybe she really was Satan in cutesy-wear, but next thing I hear out of her mouth is…

“Well, we weren't there, so maybe the vice president knew something about Nelson Mandela that we didn't. Maybe the ANC were plotting some terrorist attack that none of us knew, and the vice president was looking out for Americans. Just because Nelson Mandela is popular now, that doesn't mean he couldn't have been in jail for a very good reason.”

I could barely believe that I now had to explain the relevance, necessity and generally goodness of Nelson Mandela.

“Nelson Mandela is one of the great leaders and peacemakers of our time. If you knew anything at all, you'd know that the ANC was actually considered conservative. Like Martin Luther King in America, as opposed to a Malcolm X.”

Paige shrugged. The rest of the class was silent, and I calculated the time it would take to get two Excedrin in my system and stop the headache threatening to move from the back of my head straight through my eyeballs. No, there was no joy in Georgia that afternoon. And I could only imagine there would be a note waiting on my windshield in the not-so-distant future.

 

Age may be nothing but a number, but there is a divide between youth and maturity that teachers are constantly called upon to negotiate. For instance, as much as I'd like to rip Paige's head from her tiny frame, as much as she's flat-out incorrect in many of her statements, I'm better off engaging with her than silencing her. Yet sitting in my office, the small bastion of kitsch in my newly adult lifestyle, surveying the Felix the Cat magnets on my file cabinet and Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox with its less than ironic confederate affiliations, I can't help but wonder what's happened to the youth of America. When I was in college, a liberal arts education meant challenging the ideas you'd been handed by your parents. I remember a class on social theory that I took where the professor announced, as though he'd received a memo directly from the source, that God was a myth, and wasn't it nice that we'd all evolved past believing in such an antiquated archetype? This incredibly well-educated and authoritative man challenged what I believed. But at the end of the day, it was my job to weigh the different evidence and sources, and my beliefs were still my own. And if college was a place of same-sex kiss-ins, protests against U.S. policy in Africa, rabid vegans and sweatshop consciousness awareness, wasn't that the point? To shock you out of complacency and challenge what you believe, so that when you left you could think critically and come closer to calling your ideas your own?

“That bad?” Asa asks from the doorway of my office. “You look like they really put you through the wringer.”

I motion her inside and she sits down, wrapping both legs beneath her, and stretches back into the leather armchair that I'd bought at a surplus store over the weekend. “Atlanta State's a conservative school. I assume you're used to that from Langsdale.”

“I guess. I just always felt that in Langsdale the kids had an excuse. I mean, it was rural Indiana, for God's sake. Half of them hadn't even seen a black person live and in person until they got to college, and if they'd met a gay person, you can bet he was in the closet. These kids are bossy and…intractable. They won't budge an inch from what they come into the classroom thinking. What's that about? It's like they arrived at college intent on
not
learning anything we have to say.”