Robert Frank’s House
It always made me feel better to walk by Robert Frank’s house. It was on Bleecker, not far from where I got off the train in the morning, on the way to the pool, or even just going straight to work on mornings I couldn’t take getting up so early to get to the pool on time, it was so black out there. He lived in a green row house on a street of stores and other small brick buildings, and not far from the Planned Parenthood and the old theater, both places where I had spent time over the past twenty or more years. I hadn’t known until the last ten or so that Robert Frank lived there, at the green 7, and once I learned this, I would imagine him inside the green house with a green door, green trim around the transom and wide windows above the street and even a green grille of wire over the lower windows to keep out thieves and people who wanted to look in. The green was always a bit deeper in my memory as well, more of a jewel color, or deep leaf, so that when I saw it, it always looked a shade too light, too chalky: Was that the same color it had been last time? Had it faded? Except now he was dead, the man with the photographs, who had been famous for The Americans, images taken during his cross-country trips during the Jim Crow era, but I was still comforted because I knew June Leaf was in there, she who had lived with him all those years, the dark green late summer leaf, as I imagined her, keeping the whole house still green. A name I wished I had: June, Leaf, June and Leaf together, both concrete and ephemeral, platonic, emerald.
Even in the pitch-dark of early morning, the green shone. It stood out from the darkness. Much of the time, at that hour, I would be singing. It was a different story at the end of the workday, when people were walking by, and when my head felt heavy, and there was a gnawing in my stomach, a dry metallic taste in my mouth, but in the mornings, I was free. There was no one awake at home to fight with when I left so early, no one to see me on the street, not that I cared if my hair were brushed or unbrushed, if I were smoking or not smoking, where I was going—but I was pretty much always singing the same thing, one tune or another, morning songs, Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’, I was layin’ in bed, wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all. It was the wrong song to be singing, “Tangled Up in Blue,” as the singer was a man, and it was about loving a woman, a woman whom he loved over several stanzas and many years. It was a song I had known for a long time, and there were various reasons it came back to me, including its mention of other poets from centuries before, and it seemed, also, comforting to have in my head, and to release its sounds into the air, when the morning was so early that it was well before the sun was shining, that early. Someone should write that song.
What else did I sing? Because truth be told, there is always more than one song, more than one you can carry with you at a time. Sometimes it was the old torch song, in the style of Kurt Weill, the one that went, Don’t forget me, please don’t forget me, make it easy on me, just for a little while … That, too, had a line about the dawn coming, which it wasn’t, it was so early; and granted, when she sang it—a woman, in the version I knew, Marianne Faithfull, from her album 20th Century Blues, who seemed to have taken on the persona of an old cabaret chanteuse, lamenting something with great irony and even a kind of vengeance—it was the most savagely delivered c’mon get happy you would ever hear, maybe that was why the tender parts of the song, by comparison, were so much more tender, more plaintive. Let me know you think about me, too.
The other things I would sing, and this was more like work, or practice, were old blessings in Hebrew: one, the blessing before you read Torah, which it seemed as if I was always being asked to come up and recite before the congregation, and which I was always getting wrong, or singing somewhat off-key, or garbling a syllable, so I needed to practice it continually, just in case; and the other, the blessing you were only supposed to say on holidays and special occasions, whenever something was happening on the Jewish calendar for “the first time,” the She-he-chey-anu prayer, that particular nuance of which I had misunderstood—for first times, holy times, only—though even after I learned of my mistake, I liked to say this prayer once a day, at least, when I remembered. Its final syllables, “Laz-Man-Ha-Zeh,” almost seemed to dare you to shout at the end, all those z’s—God who got us TO THIS DAY, to this day, this day, and the next, I didn’t know how I would get through them, or how I had gotten through them so far, and they stretched forward with no break, in single file, like a file of soldiers. It was worth a prayer. Every time was the first time.
In the early early morning, I was really myself, was the reality with no witnesses, with no markers of my age or station, just that eight-or-so-minute walk from the train to the pool at the Y, the doorman there watching me go by, I could be old or young, steady and solid or ephemeral, even a ghost, even a drunk version of myself from thirty years ago, standing on the corner outside of Planned Parenthood so late at night that it was also early early in the morning, working up the courage to go and test out her sexual liberation, at the moment when I understood for the first time: sleeping with boys was all right, it was safe, it didn’t have to be planned, and whatever the result, the consequences could be un-planned, not that I had in the end needed the assistance of Planned Parenthood, just that I had stood there so long ago with a boy, looking up at the window of his apartment, which you could also see from that block, the window of a boy I hadn’t known very well, on the cornice of whose building lodged an owl carved into the stone, joking that it seemed like a sign, that he lived in view of Planned Parenthood, and that I should just go, go up with him. For all I knew, even thirty years later, that long ago now, that particular boy, now grown up, still lived there. What I did know was that Robert Frank’s house, green shuttered, looking the same in the early early morning, had also been there, across the street from where I had stood in my quandary, even then; the house had been there, available to comfort me, had I known. That early morning was a moment I went back to, a moment when I had realized: you could just do “it,” just go sleep with someone, ring the doorbell, or show up, or follow him up on the way home from the bar, take off your clothes, not much talking needed, and no consequences, “it,” whatever that snap decision might be.
In this present reality’s eight-minute walk along that little promontory of Bleecker, I was my true self, I didn’t have to explain who Robert Frank was or if he was still solidly in there, still alive, even if that bit of life were just something kept alive in the bosom of June Leaf, whom I would swear was still living there, alone, and why would she abandon that apartment, right next to the boxing club, and two doors from the restaurant that had closed where D. and I had eaten regularly many years ago, when we were still courting, the old theater, a fanciful, now-defunct amateur opera company, where I had waited for D. at the stage door, when I had thought anything was possible and that I was on the path, finally, with D., to a normal life, one with stability, respectability, and not all of this moving around, and being traded around from one reality to another. New York took a long time; it took a long time to get used to yourself there. Sometimes, over the years, both before and after I knew about Robert Frank, I noticed while walking on that particular block the tiny yellow leaves that would fall there, leaflets like confetti or sprinkles, all of a uniform shape, rounded on one side, flat on the other, a D, a harp—there weren’t many streets that had this particular kind of leaf, which fell in the autumn usually after a rain, the leaves of the honey locust trees, and later, after the leaves fell off, at an unlikely moment in the middle of winter, the beans would drop, short thick brown bean pods, with green seeds the size of lima beans, and they smelled alive when you split the pods open.
What was the line of the song? Who could I ask?
When the dawn comes, by the poolside, while the fireflies are all around you … But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t “the dawn,” it was just the way I had remembered, in the early morning, those words.
The will to live, fresh and green. Five blocks over and a little bit up, there are NYCHA houses, cement and tan brick, burnt-orange doors of the same vintage as the ones at our school, one of a surplus of schools in the area that ringed this complex, north and south and east and west of Houston, institutional doors with chipped, bumpy paint, and steel handrails, and uniform, industrial-design, curved door handles everywhere. Many of the students at the school where I had been teaching the past several years lived in such houses, some in the ones on further down avenues, the As, Bs, Cs, with a lower, rusted brick with a black metal trim. The students from these houses often attended our school, the post-pandemic generation who stayed up all night playing games online, unable to sleep, or just not sleeping, night after night, and it was our job to care about them, to care whether or not they graduated, if they hit certain benchmarks in certain standardized tests, their behavioral variations within certain clearly defined parameters, and there were forms we had to fill out, where we assessed and noted their performance in these categories, keeping track, similar to the practices of agricultural workers obliged to keep inventory and production data on cows in a dairy: was she a good milker, had she gotten her shots, this one bucked in her stall, this one lost a calf, this one had a white star on its nose, this one went dry but then came back, this one’s teat rot was cured by a salve, this one responded to the electric volt. One of the NYCHA buildings was seventeen stories high. Others were eleven, others somewhere in between: eight, six, even four. Next to this complex was a shoe-repair-tailor-and-dry-cleaner, a post-office-box-rental-and-check-cashing place, and the kind of unrenovated Fine Fare that smelled of fish in the back, and had a leaking row of cases so that enough water gradually pooled to need mopping up by the end of the day; there were few places near there to get a coffee, and the M14 went through so quickly, on its way down from the power plant on 14th Street, that it was easy to forget to get off, if that’s where you needed to go.
What the view was from the top of one of those buildings must not have reached as far as Robert Frank’s house. It must have been a view limited to the tops of the surrounding row houses, the roofs of the Indian restaurants along 6th Street to the west, and to the east, after the treetops of Tompkins Square Park, the wall of public housing that stretched all the way to the FDR, though it was doubtful you could see that far. South of this patch of buildings, just out of view from the panorama of that rooftop, was the school where I taught, far to the west, no doubt impossible to see from a roof on 1st Ave. If you were a student at our school, however, it was a close walk, which is another reason some of the students from those projects ended up at our school, though others came from much farther away, way up in the Bronx, or even Staten Island. Sometimes there were students who would talk to me, but usually I was just another of the adult presences there to sharpen their pencils, help them fill out their worksheets, give them their bathroom passes, and behind the scenes, to make sure their paperwork was filed on time. The paperwork: we had to document the “biographical,” as they say, document whether they had fulfilled this or that requirement, what the social history intake or the psychiatrist had once said, the mother, the grandmother, the physician, the classroom teachers. What was their attendance record. Where had they been before and what had they said about them there. Was it a “D75” school, referred to as a “more restrictive environment” they had transferred to our school from, or from an even more restricted environment, a residential school where they were not allowed to leave until they were signed out by a legal guardian, or reached eighteen and could sign themselves out: this seldom happened, that one of our students transferred from so restrictive a place.
One of my duties was conducting the “transitional interview.” What did the student want to do after graduation? A trade school, a job as a home health aide, community college to study business. What about afterward, what did the student “envision”—this was a word from the official interview form, but it sounded poetic, a vision the student, the parent, might have of what would happen next, in some future that had to be better than the present. In the end, it was hard to keep track of a student after graduation, and sometimes students just left, leaving no more data to be collected for the transitional interview update. Some were just discharged, leaving me with a minimalist exit summary form to fill in, and only an outdated address to mail it to, so that it could get bounced back, the returned envelope placed in the file.
Because I liked to write, and because I liked people, I misunderstood this part of my job for many years. I had interviewed students and families, I had collected the information and anecdotes from classroom teachers and written up my own observations. I had made inferences and pieced together coherent narratives from the data I had gathered, and these were what I wrote up. I wrote biographies, more or less, that no one would read, that talked about the best parts of my students, what their strengths might be. Somewhere, in a questionnaire or self-assessment, I remember I had written that these narratives were “living documents,” I had believed that the words on the page, the forms I filled in, might help someone, might allow a student to make sense of something that hadn’t been seen before, some strength or quality, but in the end, I learned that this took too much time, and most other people copied and pasted the pro forma phrasing from existing documents written by other people at other places about other students, without even changing the pronouns, and no one really cared enough to even read these documents, not the student who struggled with reading and was ashamed to have had one of these documents written up about those struggles; and the parents of such students, if we could find them, did not read them but kept them in order to file for state and city SSI benefits later, to prove that they were raising a child who had troubles, who was disabled or flawed in some way, like a bruised apple in a tray, or an egg with a hairline fracture you didn’t see until you got it home from the store and had already cracked the first few of the dozen so you couldn’t return it.
Often, when I called those parents for more information, or to review the updated reports each year, the refrain was “What am I going to do with … ” or “He’s eighteen, it’s on him now, there’s nothing I can do, he’s on his own,” the ubiquitous “Ain’t gonna lie Miss, it’s on him, it’s all on him now,” which meant it was on me, it was on us, our school, to figure out why he didn’t come to school, why he spent his time in the stairwell or the park, in smoke, why he couldn’t read or write or add, and how was I going to help him figure out how to do these things, and fill out his own paperwork and forms, and pass the exams, and get out of here.
Rarely a student came who liked school, by which I mean was willing to participate in completing the work for the required classes, the xeroxed pages from books we were reading, the periods of history—philosophers, dictators, revolutionaries—math worksheets, lab simulations, and to ask questions about it. Once I had taught a boy to sew. One time I showed them one of Robert Frank’s photographs, which I printed out in a faithfully tinted black-and-white on the fancy color printer, to make a connection between what we were studying and the city we actually walked around in, although it was not part of the packet (we taught history organized into “packets,” roughly by decade). At other times, I asked them how this or that thing that had happened in the world was related to something we had studied; sometimes I forgot, and would pronounce things the way they were meant to be, in German or some other language, but students would complain that I was silly or confusing. Miss you confusing me. And so mostly I stood writing notes for them at the board while we pronounced totalitarian for them as total-tarian, day after day. Didderott and Dezcartez. An educative guess. Spears of influence.
We had gone up once, to the top of the school, the day of the eclipse. I had been afraid to go to the edge, to the balustrade. I knew I would get dizzy, the way everything was still, the same way it was from the top of the Sacré-Cœur, the whole city flat and spread out there, not just a place, but a moment in history, a photograph without a camera, nothing moving, everything glittering. The roofs looked flat and the roads really did look like straight lines the way they did on certain kinds of cartographic representations, and there we were on top of the school, instead of inside of it. Every day, we walked in, through the front doors, up the stairs, in and out of the rooms, and up and down the halls, between the desks and the tables, the whole time keeping the inner self in check, waiting for the buzzers to ring that would get us through the paces of the day; the world outside was flat, it seemed, but also inside. I waited for the last bell, when I could leave, go to the pool at the Y across the park and swim, then walk down that crooked, amiable, leaf-sprinkled street of old where I could re-encounter myself of old, get on the train, and then emerge at the far-off station in Brooklyn, as the person who loved and who wanted to get home to the person she loved—to my own child—who was coming from a similar kind of place, and to pretend it was okay and normal for any child to feel the way he felt at his school, to feel that what we did all day as we spent our days, day after day, was of necessity, this way, and this was how it was all over the world, there was no other way.
Because it was, wasn’t it? If you didn’t do this, what would you do all day? Someone said that to me once: when something terrible happens, you want to do nothing; you want to know—how could anyone “do” anything after the terrible thing happens? And then again, were we supposed to do nothing, were we just supposed to sit there? We had to do something. We had to be about our business, and listen to those buzzers, and get through the day, the day needed shape, otherwise we would sit there and contemplate it and see too much in it; all flat would it be, laid out in front of us, the day, the reality, and ready to be cut up and glued onto a piece of construction paper, with a caption, something about what its Central Idea was, and what the Author Intended for you to Do or Believe or Take Away, what the Message or Lesson was. If we didn’t do something, we just might think too much, and in its many amorphous forms of formlessness, we might understand that reality, the day, the moment, was indeed all meaningless and harsh, and the structures we invented to process and understand it were arbitrary and reductive, so what were we to do, how were we to live among that? These were questions, at our school, we wanted to be spared from asking, or trying to answer, or whose existence we did not even wish to acknowledge, such questions.
It was not important or relevant or in my job description, that question I had often had; it was a question that had gotten me to many places, all of them amounting to nowhere. I had had it at 4608 Spruce, and 427 Lancaster Ave and on Duck Pond Lane, at Winthrop House, and in Americus, Georgia, in my room at Belofte, at many many places, in the back bedroom at 347 West 84th, where the fourth-floor window seemed dizzyingly high up but only looked out at some harmless gardens, green and soft, and where the neighbors got a rooster, eventually, and a hen who laid blue eggs, and how couldn’t you think that was beautiful? The gentle blue of the egg? Not an aberration, but bred to be blue, and to be eaten?
It’s a healthy question, why do this, why keep on, what was the point? I was reassured once by someone that it was healthy to ask this question. But no one else seemed to be asking it, and certainly not my students, none of them were asking it, and none of them seemed to even have it in their minds at all, though to me their lives seemed harsh, and focused on enmity and rivalry, pleasures and games, and music that sounded like a military march, a simplified, droning, rap—it was even called “drill”—and their understanding of history and politics was flatter than a map, and all they wanted was the next bag of nuggets, the next nail salon, the next thing to put in their ears, the next puff, to make it all go away. Who wouldn’t want that? What even kept them coming here, to us? Yet they came, and I cared.
If you look up, look up, on your way in to school, you can see things up above you, the shadowy tops of the buildings, barely, and then, slightly lower, plastic bags stuck in trees, and things that must have been squirrels’ nests. You had to wonder, or I did, what would have happened on the way down—would the trees scratch at you, could you use them to try to stop yourself, if you had changed your mind? Or were they the last things you saw? Were you unconscious before you hit the ground—I imagine that the feeling of falling and helplessness was not a relief, a sudden loss of the oppressiveness of being aware, but a struggle, an attempt to recall from time the split-second decision to go. Nothing one could decide so quickly should be inevitable. That was the problem with guns, with the linking of physical action to an impulse rooted in subjectivity, and which could be fatal. That was the problem with any such decision or the wrongness that such decisions were even possible. If all your life, all those moments, informed that decisive moment, and there hadn’t been enough of something or other in those moments, enough of an experience of other people living their lives, through the awfulness, and reinforcing, simply by their being, that living was indeed worth it, despite how awful it was at times—because the awfulness was not permanent, there were eight minutes here and there, there were interstices, even when things were at their worst; and that too passed, and other times no interstices were needed, because everything was mellow and fine, and nothing felt desperate or damned. If you hadn’t gotten enough of that something, from the people around you, then you would come to your own conclusion, on such a day, a bad day, and your impulse would seem to make sense within its context, there was nothing to balance it, in your memory, in your experience. There was no reason to wait around for what might lie ahead, what might balance the moment. Maybe you thought you would be able to talk about it the next day, you didn’t understand that that would be it, there would be no retrospect. That was the last day.
“You seem really annoyed, like you hate what you are doing.”
That was the first thing she said to me, the famous student, the one who merited an entourage of teachers and social work trainees following her around, making sure she didn’t break down crying during class, or run out of the room, or worse, have a seizure due to the heavy medications they were testing out on her, to make sure that she didn’t sweep a row of computers off of the desks, or run out of class screaming and disturbing the other students, or hold the principal’s hand so tightly that the principal needed an ice pack later, or whatever it was she had done that had gotten her this far, to this sorry place.
Usually, I hide my annoyance pretty well. I have a shell, a play that I’ve constructed and whose plot I use to get myself through the day; it is a mild, disinterested perspective where nothing can hurt me, I think of myself as a helper, while my brain and my soul wait until they can return, and walk home, to the places where I am real. This self is red in color, like the dull foil over a valentine heart, shiny, deflective, pleasing, a bit dark, so that no one even notices that it is camouflage.
So why did I decide that, when this student spoke to me, having asked me to explain something on a worksheet, or to bring her a sharpened pencil, that I would answer with a shred of my soul showing, my angry soul; that I would tell her the truth.
“I am annoyed, I guess. This job can be really annoying, people asking you things all day, people being mean, and none of them wanting to be here, and having to do it all day long. Yes, I am annoyed, some days it shows more than others.”
“I thought you seemed annoyed.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to seem annoyed at you.”
She was, if not the only person who noticed, exactly, that my frazzled and short-tempered self was showing, the first person to comment on it. And she was, implicitly, annoyed with me, for not bringing her the pencil fast enough, or not having the patient, pitying demeanor she seemed to elicit from the other adults who came in contact with her. How was she going to survive in this fishbowl, a person who had the boldness to demand more than anyone else, and expect she was going to get it; a person who wanted to be loved, tolerated, served; a person who saw things as they were, even the ugliness of things, and felt entitled to speak up about them.
There was another time, a particularly cumbersome lesson, where students had to “code” an article about microbes in food, or the problem of congressional term limits, or whether or not to teach “the classics” in urban schools, articles that were unimaginably tedious to read, in order to prepare them for a test that measured students on how well they could construct an argument, even if it were something they did not care about in the faintest, and whose subject they could only barely grasp. The content or “lead” teacher (I was the designated skills or “subordinate” teacher) was adept at seeming passionate about this practice for the sake of convincing the students to go along with us. We taught a predetermined curriculum that prescribed a series of simplified “codes” for sorting the evidence, so that it could be plugged in to support claims and counterclaims: red light (to refute the claim), green light (to support the claim), yellow light (background information). These were tricks that taught students to “utilize” the text when cutting and pasting together this argument no one cared about, and assemble it into some kind of written form, a template the students were to internalize and reproduce when the exam ultimately occurred. We delivered this explanation of codes and methods like a cheery battering ram, and most students were able to maintain the requisite passivity so that its barrage did not hurt them; then, the students were to immediately perform the method on the stack of articles we had issued them, and create rhetorical attacks of their own, except they would almost all be exactly the same mishmash of stock phrases, sentence starters, and underlined survey results. The assumption was that they had no existing methods, or style, or opinions, or even thoughts or questions or ways of answering these exam questions or exploring them. And she was crying, this girl, quietly weeping. The lead teacher had observed, and rightly so, that this student often pretended to be helpless so that she didn’t have to do the tasks put before her, as they were antithetical to her nature as a freethinker. And when it was a task as reductive and uniform as this, it made sense to me that it would be painful to be forced to do it, painful, when the spirit knew it transgressed any kind of independent thinking, when the spirit of this particular girl knew it could go to a piano, and take a feeling, and let it flow through the fingers to the keys, and make something beautiful that had never before existed.
“I can’t stay here,” she whispered to me. “It’s hurting me, Miss, it’s too much to process, please let me leave.”
“Just wait,” I said, “wait until the lesson is over.”
“Please,” and she was crying, quietly, behind her thick-framed glasses, her fingers unable to grasp her pen which had a fuzzy pink pom-pom on top of it, her face drooping down, her legs too short to reach the floor, just dangling there, giving the effect of a Raggedy Ann doll, even her hair, which was a series of braided extensions wound with chenille ribbons and plastic beads, hanging down, “Please.” It is amazing how well you can picture someone whom you knew for only a short time, but I can see her, hear her, the very curl of her lip, and the way she would modulate her voice, higher and higher. Please.
I looked at the lead teacher, and knew that it was not worth it to take matters into my own hands, that I had to comply, I had to discharge my duties, like a sergeant who was following a lieutenant, who was following a chain of other commands from other commanding officers, which necessitated a belief that these structures and methodologies were designed for the good of all, for high reasons of social justice, empowerment, and literacy standards. I was afraid not of being scolded myself, if I let the student just go, but of the lingering disdain that would be the consequence were I to let her leave this interminable lesson, the judgment that I was weak, that I was an enabler, that I already did not heartily uphold the various laws, the cell phone law, the bathroom law, the law of hall passes, of no music devices in the ear, of one central idea per text, of scoring well on standardized tests. That if I didn’t uphold these laws then I would lose even more of my credibility, and it would be clear that I did not truly care about the rules of our school, and did not abide by and in fact scorned and thought I was better than them—and would hence be preyed upon by colleagues who were enforcers and believers in order to keep their pensions, and alert to anything that might lead to our school going On a List of state mandated monitoring, the sure trajectory to being shut down; I would be tacitly disapproved of, and unable to maintain any respect, throughout the coming days and weeks and years. I was a relative newcomer to the profession, and I was already on this path, but as I knew these judgments would accrue, in exponential increments, over time, I tried very hard to keep my infractions to a minimum, to stave off the inevitable moment where I would be revealed to be a total outcast by the other teachers, a rogue, a person who would have respect from neither colleagues nor students. Individuality—or individuality that was too different, and did not stem from bravado and emotional restraint reinforced by high student test scores, or else from having been entrusted by the highest number of students with their most salacious and confidential gossip—was a liability in this climate.
“No,” I said. “Just wait.” I even walked away, to let her suffer alone; the other part of me was weeping in the same way: let this child go, let her stop being tortured by this barrage of rules, let me also be freed from this barrage of stupidity, the battering ram of words and directions being dumped into her brain and mine in order to comply with some lesser greater power. Why didn’t I speak up? Where was my voice—for poetry, for beauty, for freedom, for the green house on the leaf-littered street? In order to get through the six hours and forty minutes of my day, I had to forget beauty, my beliefs about education, and from experience, I had learned that these students had had beauty and freedom gouged out of them long ago, and that given the chance, they did not respond to it, they laughed at it, if they noticed it at all.
Recently, when I had been asked to cover a class on my own (my job was to work in collaboration with other teachers in many different subject areas, to design learning materials—I was not a lead teacher who stood before the whole class, nor did I wish to be one), I had brought in the Robert Frank photograph of the Black nanny holding the bald, white baby, both looking off camera in different directions, the hostility between them crackling.
“She a white baby, but her mama Black.”
“In the day, they didn’t do that, it musta been right after, otherwise.”
“That kinda relationship? Feel me?”
“The daddy at work. He white, he ain’t there. The mama, she gotta stay home.”
I found these printouts—are these yours? Did you go over the multiple-choice strategies yesterday like I asked? in response to the wasteful excess of printouts of the photograph on the windowsill.
Finally, the bell rang, and I was allowed to let her free. I was her torturer. I was my torturer.
“I can’t process,” she had said.
That was what she had said on the phone, I’d heard. “Something happened. I just can’t process it, I can’t process.” Except that time, she was on the roof of a building, was it seventeen stories high, was it the eleven-story building? She had ended the call and dropped the phone, so even with all of their cellular tracking systems, they—the police, or the emergency unit, or the paramedics—had been unable to find, in time, which rooftop she had called from, and she was clever; after she dropped the phone, she had clambered onto a different roof, all those public housing buildings are the same, I’ve heard since, the roof doors are unlocked, anyone can go up there to party or sleep or do whatever they want, there is no surveillance, no one watching, because just as much as other parts of existence were saturated with surveillance, who cared what happened on top of or inside of one of those buildings. And she had known this, had figured out that because of the very machine that controlled us, and its preoccupations, when it cared and about whom it did not, she could have some autonomy, some privacy, a moment for a free action where no one was telling her she had to sit there and listen and think a certain way by a certain template anymore. No one was listening; the dispatcher had put the call on hold for so long anyway, by the time they got back to us, so we could report a student had called us in distress, she had jumped. Should we have called a different number for help? A different emergency response unit? Should we have known better than to call the general 911? We would know for the next time, that this was not the number to call, that there were better ones, we would tape up a list by the phone in the main office.
It must have been that very morning, it came to me later, and then I checked my tan spiral-bound notebook—it was that very morning, that I had woken up early and finally written down what I had been thinking about Robert Frank’s house, and his street, and then gotten dressed, caught the train, and walked down the very street I had just written about, on to school, and that same particular Wednesday continued to unfold just the way that it did; I calculated that she had been on the roof right at the time, on that day, that I had scurried to the copier, in order to copy more copies of an article about graffiti for that same class, now, for the imminent lesson. I was so afraid to make a mistake in copying it that I sent the packet of articles through a few times, to make sure the staple was stapled the way it needed to be, “horizontal not diagonal” was the directive, though by the time the twenty copies had been stapled, I realized that the highlighting had not shown up clearly on the page, to everyone’s dismay, when I raced back to deliver them to the class on time. Was she still on the roof, when the bell rang for the start of class, during that day’s read aloud about Tunguska, the asteroid that hit Siberia, killing hundreds of reindeer, and which the students found boring, and that I read “too fast” as I couldn’t bear their contempt, even after I showed them the photographs of the flattened trees like bristles of a hairbrush, and the Earth there as it was now, a giant green crater in the middle of the taiga? “It don’t look that big, Miss,” one of them said, even when I explained that this was an aerial photo, and that what had fallen, and had shaken the Earth three hundred miles away, had been the size of the head of a pin.
“Do you mind? Reading it to them again, slower?”
I read it a second time, slower. According to the article, only reindeer had perished—but I was sure there had been woodcutters in that forest, women gathering mushrooms. How should we code this—would it be positive or negative evidence? Evidence of what? What would the claim be? What were the answers to the guiding questions, and could they be highlighted in the text and then recopied word for word on the two blank lines provided for the answers? I didn’t mention how Tunguska had always scared me as a child, and that I had read recently that a much bigger asteroid was heading toward Earth, and that it should make each and every one of us live our lives differently, as it rocketed closer. Did I want to be here, in this classroom, the day the asteroid came, teaching them how to color-code articles made to be dissected into Source-Based Argument Essays? Did I want to hide under a table with one of them, die next to one of them, when the asteroid, or the school shooter, or the bomb from Russia came? What was the difference, really. If I left the classroom, if I walked out, with no explanation, as I dreamed of doing, what would become of me, my child, my health benefits, my apartment; it was too drastic, I had to stay put until I found a better solution. It was just then, between classes, another colleague came to find me. “Don’t change your expression,” he said, “but didn’t you teach”—and he said her name, and paused—“I just heard something—don’t change your expression!” We stood in the doorway of the classroom as the students filtered in. 17, he wrote on the board. Number of floors, he mouthed. They had said there was still a pulse when they found her, but this was later reported to have been misinformation from the dispatcher, perhaps intentional, to soften the blow, a misguided kindness.
On the way home, back to the train, that day, I walked, purposefully, by Robert Frank’s house. There was the green 7 on the door, and for the first time, I saw people out front, pointing at it. I watched from across the street, from a different angle than usual, as it was early afternoon, and I was walking toward the train station, not away from it. I could see through the transom over the door that a fluorescent light was flickering unpleasantly along the ceiling of the front hallway, even though it was light outside, far from evening. I could see that in the part of the house where people lived, the windows were dark. A couple with enormous backpacks on rang the doorbell. Were they invited guests? They rang again. They put their hands around their eyes, up against the panels of the door, as if they could see through the wood, what was on the other side of the green. They both had cameras around their necks, and gear hanging from their backpacks. Even from across the street, I could hear that they were talking, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying—did they say June? Or Robert Frank? Or Number 7? The man took off his backpack and smoothed back his hair, he was standing in front of the door—I didn’t wait for the woman to take the shot, I had to get home.
The next day, it was what you would expect. Her chair was empty at the desk where I always had to tell her to take off her headphones, please. I wasn’t supposed to show I was sad, for the sake of the students; I was not to set a bad example, to be weak, to make it about me. “I’m sorry you are struggling,” a colleague said; I did not know why that colleague was not struggling, to me that seemed to be the fundamental problem.
There it was, the same chair where she had sat the previous Friday; she had asked to leave the class, as the lead teacher had been absent, and she wanted to go to the guidance counselor’s office to work, which meant—if I was the teacher, alone, nothing worthwhile would occur, nothing one could get material credit for would be recorded in the grade book, so why be captive?
“Do you realize that I am a teacher, too?” I had said in a monotone, to neutralize the rage and sarcasm that seeped in anyway. “You can leave if you want to, sure, but did you know that I know something about literature, too? That I’ve even taught it at college, that I’m a writer? A poet? Maybe there are things you could learn from me, but sure, go ahead, go to the guidance counselor’s office, it doesn’t matter to me.” And I turned away. I don’t know why I had been so angry, things were already building up in me in ways maybe I am only noticing now. I don’t know why she elicited this from me, the truth. The funny thing was, even though I made her take off her headphones, and had been so cross, even though I truly didn’t care if she left the room, one less student for me to have to mind, she stayed that day. She sat there waiting for me to give her the next worksheet. What was the lesson? What wasn’t I communicating to her, what hadn’t I taught her, about how important it was to stay alive? What had I instead taught her about being alive and being dead at the same time?
These angers will die down, the awareness of the absurdity of my life, and the cruelty that keeps me living it, embedded in which is a tiny emerald-colored kernel of needing to be alive, at least for the sake of other people, and the angers will fade into the forgetfulness that makes it all feel normal, but which indeed stays intact, bound within it, a great poison I spread to everyone I meet, to her. What are the little buckles and traps of mind that keep me from doing it myself? She was a sensible girl, for all that, impulsive, yes, selfish, yes, but that was indeed the right response to all this captivity, for someone who knew what beauty was, and what was cruelty, and how even blunt stupidity, mindlessness, bureaucratic necessity, the flattening out of everything, the glueing down, worksheets, are its forms. “Oh, you teach English? I love Shakespeare,” the grief counselor who visited the staff twelve days afterward said, in the soundproof booth in the guidance counselor’s office. “Which play?” I asked, because when someone I meet at school knows who Shakespeare is, this is what I ask. “Macbeth,” the counselor continued. “It’s just like me, I’m a soldier, a scholar, that’s me at the end, that’s who’s left, who survives, that’s why I do this work,” the counselor smiled, an earring glinting. I smiled back, and didn’t tell him he meant Hamlet, who does not survive to tell his own story. The counselor gave me a business card, I should text if I ever feel sad, but should make sure to include my full name, the DBN of the school, the date of the event, to jog his memory, there are so many.
A few weeks earlier, the day of the State’s Source-Based Argument Essay Exam, I had seen her, in a side office, sitting alone at a small round table. “Taking a break?” I asked. “Yeah, I was tired,” she’d said. “Maybe a good time to listen to some music.” We had a running conversation about music, Beethoven or Bach, the Glenn Gould recording or the Richter, Chopin—it was the same conversation over and over, with variations—I don’t know how I’d found out how much she loved music, or why I thought I was safe revealing the part of myself that did, too, and we took such delight in arguing. “You’re young, of course you like that Romantic stuff,” I would roll my eyes. I once overheard her telling a boy that her favorite musicians were Alicia Keys, Beyoncé. “Why not tell him about, you know, the piano … ” She shook her head and shushed me. I didn’t understand. “You going back to the test?” I had asked her that day—technically, I wasn’t even allowed to talk to a student who was in the middle of one of those heavily guarded exams, even though she was “taking a break.” “I’m going back in. In a minute,” she said. Later, I learned that sometime after our conversation, she had simply stood up, taken her oversized purse, and walked out of the school, never getting to the coding of evidence part of the exam, not even finishing the multiple choice section—her results came back, x x x. Instead of completing the test, she caught the bus to her favorite McDonald’s, somewhere uptown, on the East Side, a ride she took regularly when she needed to calm herself, it had been reported. By the same token, really anything, an ordinary house of green glimpsed in the morning, a snatch of a song misremembered, could make one feel like continuing to live.
Had I done it differently, what might she have done differently, she who had taken so much joy in life, the clicking beads and chenille ribbons in her hair, the outfits with matching shoes, bags, jewelry, her nails with gel flowers appliqued onto them, the “rose gold” color of her headphones and phone case and eyeglass frames, all of it? The pictures she had taken of herself, that they printed to make the farewell poster—with so much makeup, so many disguises, that she was unrecognizable, a bloated, inflated, puffy doll, pouting her mouth in the pose known as “beautiful” for a lens that devoured the generic, the gross, passive baby faces that passed for beauty. When they identified the body, they said that she had bruises on her face, nothing terrible though, but that even there in the early evening, she was already swollen, maybe all the medication, they speculated.
