Election (15 page)

All I really knew was that I needed to find a new job, and find it fast. I spent hours wide awake at night, tormenting myself with worst-case scenarios—I'm a Night Manager at Burger King, ridiculed by my teenage employees; I'm planted in the frozen aisle at the Price Club, gamely offering a tray of microwave stuffed mushrooms to passing shoppers; I'm driving a Mr. Softee truck that plays the same insane jingle over and over, eight hundred times a day.

Frank was a former student of mine, a member of the first class I'd ever taught at Winwood. A completely forgettable kid. From the day he graduated to the night he called, he hadn't crossed my mind a single time.

“Frank Griffin,” I said, fruitlessly searching my mind for a face to match the name. “What have you been up to?”

“I'm the sales manager at my father's dealership. Griffin Chevrolet Geo on West Plains Boulevard. That's why I'm calling. I wanted to run something by you.”

“What's that?”

“Well, I … I heard about your trouble, and I want you to know how sorry I am. You were the best teacher I ever had.”

I'd received three or four calls like this from former students, and it's hard for me to explain how good they made me feel. And sad. So much of my identity was still
bound up with teaching. It was the only thing I'd ever excelled at.

“Thanks, Frank. I really appreciate your saying that.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “I'm not sure what you're doing right now, but I was wondering if you'd ever considered sales.”

“I haven't,” I admitted. “But right now I'm willing to consider anything.”

If he heard the implicit insult, he chose to ignore it.

“We're looking for someone,” he said. “I think you'd be perfect for the job.”

“Why's that?”

“All a good salesman really needs is to listen hard and ask the right questions. It's basically what a teacher does. Just for a different purpose.”

So I drove to West Plains the next afternoon, and Frank showed me around the lot. He was a bald, fleshy guy, one of those kids who turned middle-aged the day he received his high-school diploma. I was especially impressed by the Geos, which he told me were more or less identical to Toyotas, but sold for thousands of dollars less.

“It's a smart buy,” he said. “All you have to do is give people the wherewithal to see that for themselves.”

At the end of the visit, he brought me into a woodpaneled
office in the showroom and introduced me to his father. Frank Griffin, Sr., was an imposing figure, large of belly and pink of face, like an old-time machine politician.

“So what do you think?” he asked me. “You want to give it a shot?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

“Great.” He stuck out his hand. “Welcome aboard.”

I was startled by the suddenness of the agreement, and wanted to make sure they weren't taking me on under false pretenses.

“There's only one problem,” I confessed. “I don't know anything about cars.”

“Don't worry about it,” Frank junior assured me. “You're a smart guy. You'll be up to speed in no time.”

He was right, too. I studied the sales material, attended a weekend training seminar, and kept my ears open around the lot. By the end of the summer, I was a thoroughly competent and moderately successful salesman. Sensible cars were my specialty—Prizms, Cavaliers, the Lumina van. I didn't do so well with our sportier models. Something about my personality, I guess.

It's actually kind of exciting. A cheaper high than teaching, but a high nonetheless. There's a lot of psychology involved, and just enough seduction to keep things interesting. You have to know when to talk and
when to shut up, when to be a cheerleader and when to play hardball. Diane used to joke that I was getting in touch with my own inner asshole, but all I was really doing was claiming my American birthright. There's a sales professional lying dormant in each and every one of us, just waiting for a chance to blossom.

As long as I'm with customers, I like the job. The only thing I hate is the dead time, hanging around like a vulture waiting for a carcass to turn up. That's when I remember how far I've fallen. When Rudy Francis starts telling nigger jokes and Stan Unfall brags about “porking” his wife. When Frank junior slaps me on the back and calls me “Professor.”

That's when I get bitter, when I start wondering how it is that Bill Clinton got to be President and Clarence Thomas got to sit on the Supreme Court, while I ended up here, surrounded by men who have nicknames for their penises, and talk about them like they're old friends. The only difference was that Bill and Clarence lied and I told the truth.

Mostly I keep a low profile around the lot, try to get along with everyone and not make waves. I even kept my mouth shut the other day, when Stan and Rudy defended the rapists from Glen Ridge. The boys were convicted, but the judge gave them such light sentences that the whole process got reduced to a joke. People do more time for possessing a bag of pot than shoving a
broomstick up the vagina of a retarded girl. It just makes you crazy to think about it.

“Hey,” said Rudy, “she shouldn't have been down there in the first place. What did she think? They wanted to play Monopoly?”

“I hear she had big tits,” Stan added, as if this had anything to do with anything. “A major pair of hooters.”

I could have said something, but what difference would it have made? Stan and Rudy are grown men. It's too late to shape their minds, to teach them values and a sense of compassion. You have to do that when kids are young, before their personalities harden and they come to love their own ignorance. And besides, what right did I have to be holier-than-thou with anyone? My only consolation was that Frank junior walked away from the conversation, shaking his head in disgust. He was one of mine, and maybe that had made a difference.

SO MOM WAS WRONG.
They don't whack us with rulers at Immaculate Mary. The school's so broke they probably can't afford rulers to whack us with. They also can't afford computers, a gym, or chalk for the blackboards. We even have to supply our own writing paper, believe it or not.

The teachers don't get paid much and sometimes it shows. We have a couple of good ones, fresh out of college, but everyone knows they'll be gone in a year or two, as soon as something better comes along. To make ends meet, my English teacher drives the van that picks us up in the morning. I teased him about it once, and he told me to shut up.

Even though I'm not a Catholic and have no desire to become one, they still make me take the religion class. It's not much of an advertisement for Catholicism, let me tell you. We don't have textbooks and we don't really discuss anything. When the Monsignor's in a bad mood, he just rants and raves for forty-five minutes. When he's in a good mood he runs the class like a quiz show, tossing off easy questions like Alex Trebek in a backwards collar.

“What did Joseph do for a living?” “Was Jesus Christ a man or was he God?” The girls laugh behind his back, but no one dares to disagree with him, even when he talks about abortion or premarital sex, subjects that at least a few of my classmates know a lot more about than he does. (Homosexuality doesn't even come up, believe me.) It's almost enough to make me nostalgic for Winwood.

I mean, what was I thinking? Nothing's like what I expected. Wearing my Catholic school uniform to public school was such a
statement.
Wearing it here is just
dull. Every day, the same compulsory skirt, blouse, and knee socks. The dopey shoes. Pretty soon I'm going to have to shave my head and pierce my nose just to relieve the boredom.

Dana was my other big disappointment, but I have only myself to blame for that. I got starry-eyed and built her up into something she wasn't. It's a bad habit of mine. I mean, just because someone's sexy and has a cool-looking birthmark, that doesn't mean she can't also be petty and shallow. Madonna, Madonna, Madonna, that's all she ever wants to talk about. Madonna and boys. Mention anything else and she just zones out.

My only good friend is Alice, the freckly redhead I met that first day when I came to visit Dana. Alice is great. I told her all about Lisa a few weeks ago and she didn't freak out or anything. She just asked lots of questions and listened carefully to my answers, like she really wanted to understand. When I explained what happened between Paul and Lisa, she got all indignant on my behalf.

“She was confused,” I said. “She didn't know what she wanted.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “A guy is one thing. But not your
brother.
That's as low as it gets.”

I haven't had any contact with Lisa for over a year now. Paul told me she's going to Drew next year to study Political Science. He's going to Rutgers for Liberal Arts.

I'm so jealous of both of them. I wish I could go away too, start all over again someplace better, far away from everyone I've ever known in my entire life.

Because I don't see how I'm going to stand another year of high school.

I'D BEEN THINKING
about it for a long time, but it took me a whole year to work up the nerve. About a week before graduation, I put on my red dress and drove my mother's beat-up Nova out to the Chevrolet dealership on West Plains Boulevard. The day was blue and balmy, the kind of weather that made me wish I could be a different person, fun-loving and carefree, ready to embrace the moment.

I don't really know what I was after. Revenge, I guess. Maybe an apology. Or maybe just a chance to look him in the eye without my mother present, to let him know I was an adult now, no longer the schoolgirl he'd humiliated and tried to injure. All I knew for sure was that Mr. M. was one of the loose ends I needed to tie up before leaving Winwood for Georgetown.

The approach of graduation had saddened me in a way I hadn't anticipated. The prospect of moving away from my mother, a change I'd craved for as long as I could remember, suddenly filled me with sorrow. We needed to separate, I knew that much, but did the separation have to be sudden and complete? What would she do without me? And where would I find another friend like her?

Brooding over my future, I also found myself second-guessing my past. I grew haunted by the suspicion that I'd let high school slip through my fingers, that for all my accomplishments, I'd missed out on the essential core of the experience.

This revelation had descended upon me a couple of days earlier, at a yearbook-signing party in the cafeteria. Like a tribe of celebrities, the Class of ‘93 had gathered to swap autographs, reminiscences, and pledges of undying friendship. I arrived with my brand-new
Winwoodian
tucked under my arm, three fresh pens, and a pleasant sense of premature nostalgia.

A half hour later I was devastated. I swear to God, I never felt so empty in my life. Hardly anyone asked me to sign their yearbooks. And when someone did, I was usually stumped, unable to dream up anything the least bit personal or special to say.
I'll never forget Geometry
, I would write.
You were a valued member of the Student Council
.

Other kids didn't seem to share my problem. They wrote to each other in a secret code of friendship, a breezy, intimate language that was as foreign to me as Polish or Swahili:
Don t forget the beanballs, buddy … Hey Trish, you really know how to dance!… Catch you on the boardwalk, dude
.

I mean, maybe it wouldn't matter. Maybe two years would pass and no one would remember the beanballs, Trish would be pregnant and miserable, and once inseparable friends would have fallen completely out of touch. But so what? These yearbook sentiments were real, the products of actual friendships my classmates had shared and wanted to preserve, a far cry from the hollow, distant praise hastily composed in my honor:
I'm sure you'll be a great success… You were a good President …
and the ever-popular, I
wish I'd gotten to know you better
.

Late in the party, Paul Warren sat down next to me and we traded books. I opened his to the page with my picture on it, only to find that Mark Fawcett had gotten carried away and scribbled the second half of his long, semiliterate message right over my face in bright green ink. You could hardly recognize me beneath his jagged, nearly illegible, exclamation-studded scrawl.

I turned to the cover pages, both front and back, but couldn't find any blank space there, either. Paul had
so many close friends, each one with a unique style of penmanship and a different color ink.

So I ended up writing my note on a full-page color picture of the school, as if that squat, ugly building were a better emblem of me than my own face.
Paul
, I wrote,
we really should have been better friends. I thinly we have a lot in common, don't you? You're one of the most impressive people at Winwood. I'll never forget our election. Will you call me this summer? My number's in the book.
And then I did something that surprised me. I signed it,
Love, Tracy
.

Paul finished writing in my book the same moment I finished writing in his. We traded back and he rushed off to collect another signature without even bothering to read what I'd written. I was nervous and hopeful when I opened my book to the page with his picture, but all he had to offer was a string of platitudes and generic good wishes, capped off by his full signature—
Paul Warren.
That's it.
Paul Warren.
No
hove
, no
Your friend
, no nothing.

IT WAS
a slow Tuesday. Instead of hanging around the showroom listening to Stan and Rudy speculate as to which actresses would give the best blow jobs, I drifted
over to the Parts Department for my daily chat with Ray Feldman.

Parts is an oasis of calm in the dealership, a dim cubbyhole office separated from the shine and dazzle of the showroom by a plain wooden door. Ray sat at his desk behind the counter, logging in a delivery on his Mac. Classical music hovered softly in the background.