pigeon

...having come to the decision that he had suffered enough to be a writer...

Mrs. S’s classroom was the set for a play. It was a replica pirate ship inside a museum at night. It was a clubhouse, a treehouse, a pillow fort, an eagle’s nest.

It had two stories, and you had to go up a full flight of stairs just to get to the lower one. That’s where the more classroom-looking part was. Unlike most classrooms, it was narrow, long, sunny, and airy. From there, you ascended another flight of stairs to get to the aerie, the highest point in the whole school, where you could sit at a table and “work” on something, slump in a beanbag, gaze out at the lackadasical traffic on Caruthers Street, drink tea (electric kettle), or talk to whoever else was up there, which was usually but not always nobody.

Was it junior or senior year? I can’t remember — I had the great privilege to be offered actual English credit for visiting this rarefied suite once a day under the auspices of a course called “Independent Study.” The theory was, I would work with the teacher (Mrs. S, my favorite of course) to formulate a plan, a prospectus if you will, then spend the semester in scholarly pursuit of said plan’s goals, concluding with a thoughtful self-assessment that would inform my — wait, seriously? My actual grade, on my transcript? I get to decide that for myself?

After overthinking it egregiously, I made some kind of fancy-pants research proposal about symbolism — not, like, the symbolism in any particular work, but rather, you know, symbolism in general, the whole idea of it (?), and then proceeded to while away each day’s reprieve in Mrs. S’s dignified hideout idly laying out tarot spreads, typing progressive nonsense on the classroom’s resident electric (I do believe it was a Smith Corona — one of those brownish-orange ones; it was probably a Coronet, maybe an Electra), drinking Darjeeling tea, and — best of all — conversing with Mrs. S.

When it came time to grade myself, I gave myself a C: an A for all the cool writing I had done, averaged out with an F for not even coming close to following my plan.

My teacup got so stained with Darjeeling that Mrs. S took it home and washed it for me, with bleach.

One of our conversations involved a letter from one of her former students. I was kind of jealous of this guy, because I wanted to be Mrs. S’s favorite, but they must have had some kind of dumb special bond if he was writing her letters like a big shot. Plus he was in college, which is objectively cooler than high school. Plus, he was as gay as Oscar Wilde, which is to say bisexual, which is a term I barely understood at the time. Seriously, how many alternative cool points can one offstage character rack up? Give me a break.

She let me read his letter. Haha, pretty sure that means I won.

It was debonair, he was basically a young Joyce wryly observing things, referring to himself in the third person. I only remember two parts: one, the part where he self-deprecatingly described the swiftness with which he had fallen in unrequited love with his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend; and two, the phrase “having come to the decision that he had suffered enough to be a writer....” I don’t remember what came before or after that, but it was such a perfectly self-aware instance of gentle irony, I had to file it away for future reference, for a time when I, too, would be able to poke fun at myself for being pretentious. I wasn’t quite there yet.

That it was possible to fall in love with both a boy and a girl — that too went in my psychic pocket, like a loose marble or a worry stone you forget about until, reaching into your pocket absent-mindedly, you touch it again, feel its cool surface, turn it over and over, then forget again.

We all had already known this guy wasn’t what you would call “straight,” even before he had graduated from high school. His younger brother was closer to my age; I remember him trying to explain it to me and my friends: “I think he just looked at all these male–female couples pairing off, conforming, playing the expected roles, and saw how stupid they were acting, and decided he didn’t want any part of it.”

For the record, I doubted the validity of that analysis. But who knows.

Mrs. S was the first person in whom I ever confided my own anxieties about sexuality, too. A therapist I saw for a while had administered the MMPI, which had outed me as “ambiguous.” Or was it “ambivalent?” Who knows. Either way, with this kind of clinical nonsense crowding my symbolic little brain, it’s understandable why it took me far too long to come to terms with “bisexuality.” Lol.

Mrs. S also told me one time, in that same classroom, that little oasis of nuance and complexity within the categorical hell of high school, that most days, the best she could reasonably hope for as a teacher was to get through the day without hurting anyone.

Me too, sometimes. I’m glad I saw her at my step-grandma’s funeral, and had a chance to give her a hug before she died. She helped me through so many days.

I knew her, but I knew so very little about her. She had a melancholy sense of humor. She always had a literary quote ready for any conversational occasion. She was wounded, slightly birdlike, occasionally almost translucent. Her eyes seemed to be looking out at us from somewhere far away, somewhere safe but not for long; she had to find a way to come across, our world was her only hope. She had to emerge from that dark safe place.

I didn’t know why, or how or when, but — She had suffered enough to be a teacher.