Radio Belly (7 page)

At the end of each day, your students file past you before leaving the classroom. One by one the girls stop to tie their masks back on. You hold your finger to your lips, “Shhhh.” Their eyes darken with understanding and then they step out into the hall.

Before long your students' mothers start gathering at the top of the stairs after school. They stand just beyond the front doors, whispering amongst themselves. You wave to them, but they don't wave back. You smile and they flinch. Their eyes slice at you—up-down, up-down. You feel naked—more than naked—you feel carved out.

BY THE END of your first month your students are ready for sentences. You hang noun and verb and adjective lists all over the walls of your classroom. You write “Subject Verb Object” on the board and then leap from one word list to another, guiding your students through the anatomy of a sentence. At times, standing at the front of class with your mouth stretched into a hideous yawn, waiting for a student to speak, you imagine the right word dangling on the end of a string way down inside you. If a student is really struggling, fishing around desperately for a word, you can feel it being tugged up through you. It scrapes your throat. You gag. Your tongue bucks and then, as if by magic, the word arrives fully formed in their mouths. You applaud, and then turn to wipe your eyes with your sleeve.

The more they speak, the more you sacrifice yourself, that old teacher's trick. “Describe me!” you instruct, and the sentences come rushing forward: Mrs. Teacher is ample/corpulent/spherical/abundant. According to one boy whose father is a dairy farmer, Mrs. Teacher is soft like cow belly. This is the day you write “taboo” on the board and give a short lecture—your first—about how people politely describe one another in America. They glom onto the word. Taboo: pronounced “ta-BOOH!” It makes them giggle every time.

Almost as soon as your students are speaking freely, something takes hold of your voice. You try to speak, but it snags at the back of your throat.

“It is bugs,” Mr. Bruce says when he hears you coughing. In the past weeks the air has grown thick with them: gnats, no-see-ums and smaller bugs too. Walking home they coat your arms and legs. They form a thick bug-paste in the corners of your eyes.

“It's nothing,” you tell Mr. Bruce. “Just a tickle.”

IT'S THE END of your second month. You have given them sentence structure and vocabulary. You have given them voice and freedom, but your students still can't form opinions about any of the speech topics.

Your voice is reedy and thin now, but day after day you explain about American problems—about how hard it is for obese people to fit on airplanes, about all the high school students who drive drunk and all their angry mothers, about how people with melanoma have to get skin from their thighs grafted onto their noses. Night after night you ask them to form their own opinions about these things, but they always return empty-handed, saying only, “I think what you think, Mrs. Teacher.”

Instead of American problems, they want to know about hotdogs and California and shopping malls with indoor roller coasters. You end up giving lengthy, sideways-sliding speeches. You start out talking about Disneyland and end up talking about tolerance, equality, democracy.

They always rein you in again though, interrupting to ask, “And what about ice cream? How many flavours?” or “And the shoes, even red ones?” or they jump up from their seats, cinching their pants tight around their legs, asking, “American jeans are even
this
much tight?”

You teach them the word
because
and they are suddenly speaking in long chains of logic that stretch away without end:
It is good to study English because it makes you smart. It is good to be smart because you go to Harvard.
Still you have to tell them what to say on either side of
because.

“Harvard is good because—” They stop, look up at you.

“Because it just is,” you say.

You teach them other “glue words” for sticking two ideas together. They brighten every time they use one:
Study-ing is good
BUT
! it is hard. It is hard
YET
! it is fun.
You can suddenly imagine them sitting in Cambridge coffee shops wearing tight jeans and red shoes, absorbed by their own contradictions.

Some days you snap your ruler across your desk. “You must have
some
opinions. You must feel
one
way or another,” you say, but they can't decide whether it is bad to drive drunk or good to wear sunscreen. They don't care about race relations or recycling, about the paparazzi or pesticide use. It is all good. It is all bad. It is all the same.

You go to Mr. Bruce.

“Too young for opyons. No such thing as opyon here,” he says.

“That's ridiculous!” you argue. “An opyon is just a strong feeling.
Everyone
has strong feelings!”

He pulls a translation dictionary down from a high shelf, flips to the right page and passes it to you. Sure enough, the English entries leap from Opiate to Opossum.

“See?” he says, “No opyon here. Opyon is Amican.”

You start to tell him that even if there isn't a word for it, the concept still exists, that even if the concept doesn't exist, it should, that opyons are a basic human right, but you notice he is staring at your mouth, looking so intently at it that his own mouth is twitching. You back out of the room.

AT HOME THAT night you write a letter to the people who designed the test.

To Whom It May Concern,
you begin.

You cross that out.

Dear Sir or Madam,
you begin again,
I am concerned that your test may favour students who share a specific set of
—A specific set of what? You can't seem to locate the phrase.

You tear that letter up, and the next and the next.

Dear Test Makers,
you finally write,
My students sleep on dirt floors. They don't have shoes and have never heard of the British royal family. How do you propose I prepare them for Speech Topic #7 (Monarchies undermine democracy: agree or disagree)?

While you are folding the letter, a mosquito—there are so many of them now—gets caught under your hand. It smears red and yellow across the page, limbs flattened out like a pressed flower. Beneath the mosquito you add: P
.
S
. For your information, some students don't have opyons on American problems. They actually don't.

WITH THE TEST fast approaching, the other teachers start coming to work early and staying late, occasionally keeping students into the night. You suspect some teachers haven't been home in days. In his anxiety, Mr. Bruce has launched a school-improvement project. He has recruited some of the village men to add more tin signs to the outside of the building, and there is an endless stream of supplies flowing into the school basement, even after dark. The whole village seems agitated, aflutter. Inspired by all this industry, you begin to make detailed lesson plans for the rest of your stay.

Attendance starts to slip. Your students are needed at home. There are sick goats and dry wells and vegetable blights. They come and go as they please, but you decide not to involve Mr. Bruce. In the movies, attendance problems are a defining moment in any teacher's career. You've been expecting this, even hoping for it in a strange way.

IN THE END, you agree to the American names as a ploy to lure your students back. And how could you resist once they start pounding their desks, chanting “Amican names, Amican names, Amican names”? You have all the respect in the world for their given names and you really have tried to get those names straight, but their language has five tones, all in the nose. In class whenever you ask Pin Pon to stand, six of them rise. In the end, American names are just far more practical.

On the day you finally concede, you are writing a list on the board—Jennifer and John and Susan and Sean—and explaining that a name is a very personal thing when a fight breaks out among a group of girls who, apparently, all want to be called Madonna. It's the same thing on the boys' side of the room. Three of them who want to be called Rambo are jabbing each other with pencils. They are rabid, fierce. There are nosebleeds and splinters.

Once you finally calm them down, you manage to think of ten other timeless names and then hold a lottery. This is how your students come to be named Cyndi and Tiffany and Bono and Rocky. There is a Janet and a Michael, an Elvis and a Sinead, a Whitney and a Prince. The only one who doesn't participate in the lottery is the shy manure-smelling boy. He wants to be called Clong—the sound of a cowbell in the morning.

By the time the naming is settled, you can hear the other classes being let out. Mr. Bruce is pacing the hall. His shoes against the floor sound like
Harvard-Harvard-Harvard.

YOUR STUDENTS GROW into their new names immediately. The girls start wearing their hair down. They stand a little taller and thrust their hips out when they walk. They wave to the boys using just their fingertips. And the boys have changed too. Even Rocky and Rambo are softer, more readable. During class you can see the emotions flicker across their faces—now lust, now boredom, now anger, now angst.

You begin to detect certain attendance patterns—the same boy-girl pairs absent on the same days. You try lectur-ing them on the importance of education above all else—even love. You remind them about Harvard, about the jobs they will one day get, the things they will be able to buy, but even the wildest shopping fantasies can't keep them all in the classroom.

THE AIR IS soupy with bugs now, and there is something else, a taste you can't quite place. Because it takes such effort to catch your breath, you wheel in Mr. Bruce's small TV and VCR. You will have your students watch key scenes from the medical drama they all love: the one where the young doctor gives a speech about losing her scholarship, the one where the paramedics debate resuscitating a pedophile, the one where the wife-doctor stands up to the mistress-doctor. Together you will draw a crude map of each scene on the board and then have them re-enact it. A multimedia classroom: your best idea yet!

When it comes time to map the scenes, you discover the subtitles they were reading told a much different story. In their scenes the young doctor was going off to war, the paramedics were faced with resuscitating an enemy soldier, the wife-doctor discovered her co-worker was an undercover spy.

You know you should lecture them about propaganda, about government censorship and subduing the masses, but you feel as if all the air has been punched out of you. Besides, they are excited, flushed, raring to go. You sit and watch as they run through the scenes without you. For the first time they are standing firm with an opinion: they
will
go off to war, they
will not
resuscitate the enemy, spies
should
be punished. Your more advanced students begin emoting. See how they bite their lips and run their hands through their hair? See how their chins tremble when they look off into the distance? They seem more American than ever.

At the end of class you gather them in a huddle.

“Now I understand,” says Sinead. “Opyon is like acting!”

“It is like battle!” says Rocky.

“Like small war,” says Rambo.

“Like pretend!” says Janet.

You think of certain nightspots and coffee shops at home and can't bring yourself to disagree with their findings.

“Congratulations,” you say. “We really broke through today. Now we can move beyond small talk!”

“To what?” asks Clong. “Big talk?”

THAT EVENING, WALKING home under a lingering pink sun-set, you vow to dive deep into Big Talk. You want to really find out who your students are, what they desire, what they're most afraid of. You will ask about their recurring dreams and then do fun partner-work involving Jungian analysis. You will get them to draw their feelings, to describe their families.

But in the morning when you get to school and write the word “fear” on the board, Rambo rises to speak on behalf of the boys. “We have no fear,” he says and the rest of them bang their fists on their desks in a show of unity.

So they do have strong opinions!

“Excellent!” you say, crossing out “fear” and writing “war” above it. “What does war
mean
exactly?” you ask. “Why do some countries have wars and others not? What
exactly
is the purpose of a war? Is it
useful?
Is it
senseless
and
violent?
”

They can no longer follow. They are clamped down, their mouths pulled into mean little stitches, arms crossed tight over their chests. They have nothing more to say.

After a full hour of prickly silence, you come up with the mask experiment.

It seems like a great idea at first, but once the boys are lined up against the blackboard, wearing the girls' masks and looking at you with black seething eyes, once the very air has turned sour, you start to question the whole endeavour.

“Gender-role flexibility is the backbone of a healthy society!” you say, but you're only explaining your actions to yourself.

You had hoped for catharsis and group hugs and that certain kind of conversation that can only be compared to a river: rushing and fluid and of startling depth. You had hoped to crack them open.

“Ta-BOOH?” you ask. “Too much?”

Nobody laughs. The bell rings and they all file out. Many won't return.

THE AIR IS SWARMING, filled with flying ants, locusts and pale moths that move down the street like a fluttering fog. You have to duck into doorways while they pass. All those busy wings sound like sand poured from a great height.

When you ask him why all the bugs, Mr. Bruce says, “Refugees,” but you can only assume he means migrants. Insect migrations: you saw a nature show on that once. Or maybe it's something more sinister. The air is so hot, so sweet and choking, perhaps someone is spraying pesticides in the next valley.