Lauren Takes Leave (15 page)

I once read that deep blushing was a sign of sexual
arousal, and as that thought enters my brain right now, I blush even more.

To cool down, I peel off my sweater and consider the next
move.

The best thing to do is to ignore Lenny’s comment entirely
while trying to get back on track with Doug.

I find Doug’s text, which asks whether I’ve seen his
glasses and if I think the eggs are too old to eat.

No and Yes!
I write back. I try to be friendly but
firmly dismissive.
Need to get into court ASAP—will be unreachable all day.
Have a great one!

I drop the phone on the empty seat next to mine and take a
deep, cleansing yoga breath, stretching my head back to rest against the seat.
I close my eyes and count to ten. Then I ask myself one question: What are you doing
here, Lauren?

Talking to an old high school friend? Yes.

Escaping a little bit from real life? Indeed.

But is there more to it?

Or is this behavior innocuous? Just a married woman’s
reinterpretation of feeling like the childhood daredevil by going to an
amusement park and screaming with terror and glee on the newest, craziest
roller coaster?

And when the ride ends, you walk off the dizzy feeling,
eat a Sno-Cone, win a stuffed bear, and head back home, tired but content.

Sounds plausible. Right?

I pick up where I left off and write back to Lenny.

Me:
Viral? Define please.

Lenny:
When a video or website gets over one million
hits, it has gone viral. That’s my goal—to knock one of these videos out of the
park, and launch into a career that requires more singing/dancing/writing/rapping/ass-shaking
than accounting does.

At age forty? I want to ask. Isn’t that a bit, well, over
the hill in the entertainment world? Not to be a killjoy or anything. But maybe
it’s different for guys, who can start families in their forties and become
leaders of nations in their fifties and win golf championships in their
sixties. For women, power comes from being young and glamorous, and so, as you
age, you lose more and more strength every year. Unless you’re Hillary or
Oprah, in which case, even as you change policy and make the world a better
place, people still remark on how fat and old you look.

Anyway.

I decide not to bother Lenny with my delusions of his
delusions. He didn’t sign on to this virtual courtship to be bogged down by a
brooding midlifer with no sense of humor, and I didn’t sign on to be the voice
of reason. I read back our exchange from the morning and try to get back into
funny mode before I hit Beantown.

Me:
It’s a shame that there’s so little ass-shaking
in finance these days.

Lenny:
A lot of ass-kissing, though. And plenty of
people still getting fucked by their banks.

Me:
My train’s pulling into the station. Literally.
Gotta go. Good luck spreading disease across the Internet.

Lenny:
You in NYC? Can I do you for lunch?

Me:
In Boston. Got plans with Georgie.

Lenny:
Who is Georgie? Am green-eyed.

Me:
Friend from grad school.

I disembark and put my phone in my bag. Best to keep him
guessing.

Georgie is actually Dr. Georgina Parks, Professor Emeritus
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was the head of the Language
and Literacy program when I was a student there, and from the first moment I
heard her speak, I was inspired. Actually, I was inspired even before I met
her, having already read her two seminal books on education, not to mention all
of her related articles.

Georgie is one of the country’s leading educational
figureheads, a political mover and shaker. She’s an inspiration to American
educators everywhere, having influenced national policy and changed the way we
think about teaching children to read. She’s been on
Oprah
, discussing
inequities in urban and rural areas of America. She’s been on
60 Minutes
,
promoting Literacy Speaks, her nonprofit program whose mission is to eradicate
illiteracy in this country. She’s larger than life, and she’s my professional
guru. Every speech she delivers carries with it the authority of the ages, as
if she’s speaking not from personal opinion bolstered by factual data, but from
holy, ancient sources of wisdom.

You just don’t mess with Georgie’s ten educational
commandments.

I haven’t seen her in several years, since before I got
pregnant with Becca.

There was this popular education tome from the 1990s,
called
Other People’s Children
, that I read in grad school and that
prompted Georgie’s first commandment, “Loyalty to other people’s children
first,” so I’m a little bit nervous to tell her that I now have two of my own.

Another commandment is “Lying only hurts you in the end,”
though, so that one makes me feel more at ease. I mean, I can’t lie to her and
say I don’t have another child when I do, right? Based on Georgie’s philosophy,
that will only come back to bite me in the ass.

Not sure what she’d say about my whole
lying-about-jury-duty thing, though. Best to come up with an excuse right now
about the reason for my trip.

By the time the train pulls into Boston’s Back Bay, I have
read half a novel, maintained the highly inappropriate level of my online
flirtationship, and kept my husband from getting salmonella poisoning, while
sidestepping a close call. All in all, I’m feeling pretty good.

I push open the heavy wooden doors to the lecture hall
and quietly find a seat in the back of the room. Because of the train delay, I
have missed most of this morning’s lecture. The auditorium is filled with
eager, fresh-faced twentysomethings, laptops glowing, fingers tapping to take
down every word being said. Georgie is up at the podium. Her black hair is
straight like Michelle Obama’s, her body solid like Jennifer Hudson’s during
the
Dreamgirls
phase.

Working without notes, she discusses a recent intervention
made by her team at Literacy Speaks, in which a whole school in New Orleans was
saved.

Georgie’s voice is filled with a deep, southern timbre
that carries up the aisles like an evangelical preacher’s. “These children were
at risk of drowning
twice
.
Twice.
Once from Hurricane Katrina.
And, then, after being saved from that deluge, they were almost flooded again
by inequities in our educational system. These children were left to drown in
their own ignorance. Right here in America, people.

“This is not okay,” she says. “It. Is. Not.”

She bows her head and the lights go down. An image of a
black child reading a book is projected behind her, the last slide in her PowerPoint
presentation. People close their laptops and stand to applaud her, and I join
in.

In grad school, I was lucky enough to have been one of ten
students in the program selected for Georgie’s spring seminar, Reading and
Writing as Empowerment. I took that opportunity to become Georgie’s star pupil.
I made sure that my research mirrored hers, that I quoted the right sociopolitical
educational theorists at least three times in every essay, and that I read and
reread the assigned texts so that I could recite important passages during
class.

When Georgie said that children were stifled by tests
corrected in red pen, I threw out my red pens. When she said that tests
themselves were counterproductive to the real work of teaching literacy, I
stopped giving children tests. When she said, a year later, that tests were the
only logical measurement for reading comprehension, I brought back the tests.

I even started to sound like her during writing
conferences, telling my students that their ideas were “so big,” and that their
writing “could change the world.”

I had become a Georgie puppet. I wasn’t sure the package
was authentically “me,” but it sounded really good, and made me seem really
together, and for a while, that was more than good enough.

Because, having that letter of recommendation from the
country’s leading educational activist helped me land any job I wanted. And, at
the time, there was nothing that I wanted more than to teach in prestigious
Hadley, New York.

It took me quite a while to detox from all that Georgie-speak.
To this day, fifteen years later, I still find myself using only green pens to
grade tests. I use pencils to write on essays, believing that this will show
students that, while their words are permanent, mine are erasable, mere suggestions
meant only to help push their thoughts further.

If there’s one person who can get me out of my
run-fast-from-my-middle-school funk, it’s Georgie. Hell, I’d even bet that she
can inspire me on a personal level. If Georgie told me to have sex with my husband
every night for the next two years, I would do it. Well, I’d seriously consider
it, at any rate.

I wait for her to finish talking to some adoring fans
before approaching the front of the room. She spots me and smiles, breaking
away from the group.

“Lauren! So good to see you!” We hug and I get swallowed
by her ample bosom. Georgie’s just big in every way. “I was delighted when I
got your text last night.” She steps back to study me. “You look younger.”

“I do?” I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. My
hand flies up to touch my forehead gingerly, unwittingly drawing attention
there. I snap my arm back down to my side. It’s the first time that anyone’s
noticed the Botox and I’m not sure how to react.

“Mm,” she says, cocking an eyebrow knowingly. “I like it.”

I relax. Having Georgie’s approval still means something
to me, even if it’s unrelated to the field of education. I am a bit surprised,
though, since I would have assumed surface changes were not her style.

She stops to speak to a few more students before we leave
the lecture hall, then leads the way to her office, a gorgeous, loft-like
expanse with casement windows, open to let the breeze in, overlooking the quad.
On the way, we chat about life—hers, at any rate—her research, her travel
plans, her life’s goals being checked off the master list one by one.

“And you?” Georgie asks, once we’ve settled in to some
chairs around a circular table in her office, each with a steaming cup of
coffee in hand.

“And me.” I say, considering the multiple-choice answers I
could pick from. I go with A: Home Life. “I have two demanding, draining,
life-sucking—although wonderful, the best ever, wouldn’t trade them for
anything!—school-age children. They’ve grown so fast, and sometimes I feel like
I don’t matter in their lives anymore, except as a chauffeur. And my husband is
never really home until after I’ve put the children to bed, so I feel…lonely. Sometimes
I feel like screaming for no reason,” I say, feeling like screaming. The
concerned look in Georgie’s eyes is penetrating.

I don’t want to lose my shit in front of her, so I switch
focus. “However, I’m still teaching middle school in Hadley. And loving it, of
course,” I add as an afterthought. “You know me, I’ll never tire of those
sweaty, fidgety, ADHD middle schoolers!” Okay, maybe that went a bit too far.

She nods thoughtfully. “What about your interest in
leadership?” she asks.

“Oh yeah, that,” I say, wishing I had just stuck to the
miseries of home life. I then have to explain to my idol how I was recently
passed over for the chair position in the English Department for an outsider
with nepotism on her side. “Despite my fine pedigree, exemplary teaching, and
good rapport with parents,” I add, with only a hint of sarcasm to my voice.
“Despite the fact that I did everything right.” I feel my eyes sting again and
I fight back tears. Georgie doesn’t do tears.

“It is something you still care about,” she states rather
than asks.

“I don’t know what I still care about?” It comes out as a
question. Maybe Georgie will answer it for me. That would be nice. She can just
tell me what to do so that I can find my way back on course and do it. That’s
what I liked so much about high school, and college, and grad school, too, come
to think of it. There was structure. I took courses and was handed assignments.
Teachers just told me where to be and what to do. And as long as I followed the
general rules and did my homework, I could coast through.

Maybe I picked teaching as a career because school was the
only world I really knew. And maybe—it occurs to me fifteen-plus years too late—that
kind of default thinking is lame and lazy.

“Hmm.” She actually cocks her head to study me, as if I am
some type of rare or exotic bird she’s never seen up close before. As if I
might become something for her to research. She picks up a pen and begins
jotting some notes on a pad. “And, so, what brings you here today?”

I think about the excuses I came up with on the train, and
pick the one that sounded best in my head.

Then I meet Georgie’s gaze and mentally erase that idea.
Who am I kidding? I can’t lie to her, of all people. Besides which, I need to
tell her the truth so that she can help me make sense of it.

“Because I’m cutting school like a truant teenager?” I
smile.

“Interesting.” Georgie nods, scribbling more notes.

“Which I’m doing because I’m experiencing a tad bit of a
midlife crisis?”

“Been there!” she says, holding her palms skyward as if
I’ve just found God. I expect her to add an “Amen!” but she doesn’t, which is
kind of disappointing.

Bolstered by the freeing feeling of truth-telling and the
enthusiastic support from Georgie, I’m on a roll. “Because I thought I could
get a few days off from my life by sitting on jury duty, only the courts
totally screwed with that plan and now I’ve got to come up with creative field
trips to keep me busy and out of Hadley each day?” I say-ask.

“Mmm, mmm, hmm.” Georgie is shaking her head at me with a
big fat no that actually means a hearty yes. She jots more notes on the yellow
pad in front of her, definitely using a red pen. I call her on it.