Signs of Life (22 page)

Josh died too young, but he didn’t wait around for anything. He didn’t wait around to prove he was a real man. If you went back in time to any moment of Josh’s life, you could judge his life in any act you found him doing. He biked across the country.
He traveled the world. He loved his friends unconditionally. He was compassionate toward children. He worked for charities. He took time to have fun. He lived. He never complained. He cooked delicious meals. He kissed the women he loved. He soaked up as much of Michigan summers as he possibly could. He did not wait for anything. Maybe somewhere he knew it would end quickly.

I won’t share any of this with my students. I’m there to teach a play, not to exercise my grief-stricken brain in front of them. Besides,
No Exit
is a short unit. Before I know it, we’re on to poetry.

I never really think about how an upcoming novel will impact me before I read it. It just happens. So far this year, I have done an astounding job at keeping my act together at school. I’ve only been back for four weeks, and I’ve put all of my energy into staying focused on work while I’m at school and not letting my mind wander off into the land of emotions without any reins. But I worry about poetry.

I think of Dennis, who also teaches eleventh-grade Honors English. In February of last year, Dennis’s mom passed away. She was the mother of thirteen children. Before we go any further, did you hear that number?
Thirteen
. Double digits of children.

A few weeks later, after the funeral, he was back at school in the middle of the poetry unit with his eleventh-grade class. One of the poems that his students had read for homework was “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas. One interpretation of the poem is that the speaker is pleading with his father not to die. The last stanza of the poem reads:

They were planning on discussing it in class. When they got to that poem in class, Dennis stopped his students and said, “I’m sorry, but we will not be discussing this poem.” He explained that his mom had just passed away and this poem was too hard to read right now. The students were shocked. Mr. McDavid was a tall, stern man; he was notorious for being a tough paper grader and a teacher with high standards who did not tolerate misbehavior. And here he was, tearing up from behind his glasses saying he couldn’t read a poem.

Now that poetry is in the wheelhouse, I think specifically about Dennis, his mom, and Thomas’s poem. I think maybe I will have a hard time with “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” but I read it, we read it in class, and I’m fine. I take a deep breath before I read “Death Be Not Proud,” but it doesn’t faze me. None of the death poems get to me. But then today I am sitting in my empty room on my planning period and I begin to read “Picnic, Lightning” by Billy Collins. All of the sudden, my throat dries up and I can feel my body start to shake.

Out of nowhere, the poem crushes me. I move to the corner of my classroom where no one can see me from the hallway. I cry and shake. I have worked so damn hard since returning from maternity leave to not cry at work. I am so mad at myself. I had no idea it would be “Picnic, Lightning” that would get to me. I was completely unprepared for it. But it just hit a certain nerve, a nerve that I wasn’t sure even existed, about the uncertainty of life that I will never be able to escape. Sayings like “It could never happen to me” or “What are the odds?” no longer supply me with any comfort. Most humans say these things to themselves in order to mask or ignore the truth that none of us,
not our loved ones or ourselves, are promised to be here for any length of time. “Picnic, Lightning” comes at me like a nightmare. “Remember me?” it says. “I’m that little reminder that someone is here one second and then—
boom!
—they’re gone.” Senseless, undeserving, unjust, untimely death is a rare occurrence, but “Picnic, Lightning” affirms that no matter how rare it is, it is always close enough to strike.

I turn off the lights in my classroom. I sit on the floor and take deep breaths through my tears. I keep looking up at the clock. I know I have to get myself under control in forty minutes. Not just under control. There must be absolutely no evidence of crying. There can be no puffy eyes, no plugged-up nostrils, no red face. As I cry, I continually wipe under my eyes to make sure my mascara isn’t smearing. Thirty-five minutes,
shit
. Finally, with about fifteen minutes to spare, I open my door and walk down to the bathroom. I check my face, get a drink of water, and go back to my room. Without thinking, I get my white boards ready for class. “Take out your h.w. and something to write with!” it says at the top. I list our agenda underneath.

I’ve had days like this before. I feel like I take a step up, right to the edge of the earth, and look over the cliff. On these days, I don’t want to hand Kai to anyone else. I want my sisters and my brother to move home. I don’t want to go to work. If it could end in one flash of a moment, then why on earth would I spend my time at work? But I can’t operate normally with this mind-set. I hate these days. Picnic, Lightning days.

Valentine’s Day falls in the middle of the poetry unit. You’d think I’d create a lesson plan around some love poems to honor the holiday, but I don’t. I’m not into love poems right now and I’m certainly not interested in discussing them with teenagers. Overall, I have a general feeling of resentment toward this holiday. One year ago today, Josh and I drove over to my parents’
house and told them we were pregnant. We called Moo, Ads, and Hales from my parents’ house. All night we laughed and relived everyone’s reaction. I remember my brother kept saying, “I just need to sit down for a minute.” I could hear him smiling through the phone. I can vividly remember standing in my parents’ kitchen with Josh. All of us were smiling, crying with happiness.

So this morning I wake up and of course all I can think about is how stupid Valentine’s Day is. As if most of us don’t get the crap beaten out of us by Christmas, now we have another holiday to remind us about the lack of love in our lives.

Most of these negative thoughts leave me by the time I get to school. Once I get to the classroom, I focus on tasks at hand; copies for first block, checking in homework, updating my gradebook, getting my lesson plans together.

In the middle of first hour, nine upperclassmen dressed in white button-down collars and pressed black pants show up at my classroom. First block is ninth-grade English and all of us, my ninth-graders and I, know what is going on. For the past two weeks the Berkley A Cappella Choir has been advertising Valentine’s Day serenades. There were posters all over the hallways and announcements right before lunch. You pay two dollars and this small group of choir students will come to your first hour and completely embarrass someone on your behalf.

They come to my room. I smile as I see them walk in. I wonder which one of my students is in for the surprise. Maybe an older sister ordered a serenade to torture a little brother (that happened last year), or maybe a ninth-grade boy actually had the guts to send a girl a Valentine’s Day song.

“Hi, Mrs. Taylor!” Erin Gilson walks in first. I had Erin in my eleventh-grade class last year. I remember she came to the funeral home during Josh’s viewing. So many of my students
came to the funeral home. Erin came with a few other students from our English class. I remember them staring at me, not in a bad way, just looking at me with sad and wondrous eyes. That image unconsciously flashes in front of me when she walks in. I dismiss it quickly, knowing I can’t think about that day or that place while I’m at work.

Tim Argbaum holds the harmonica. They don’t have any music sheets. They take their places in front of my class. I wait to hear the name of one of my students. Erin looks at me and says, “We’re here for you, Mrs. Taylor.” Then, before I even have time to think or mentally prepare myself, Tim blows into his harmonica for the first note and they all start in. They sing the first verse and one chorus to the song “Lean on Me.” They sing “Lean on Me” to me on Valentine’s Day.

Once they are done, I stand there frozen. Somehow I say thank you and they file out as quickly as they came in.

I will never forget that moment as long as I live. There were so many gripping elements of it, I can’t quite bottle it up. Their thoughtfulness, the way they said something without making a big deal out of it, walking out without analyzing my reaction or asking for a follow-up conversation. But also it was just the pure sound of their voices. It was a cappella, so there wasn’t a sound in the room expect for these eight students singing. There is rarely a time in our lives anymore where we sit and intensely focus on one single sound. Their voices were so strong and so real. For the rest of my life, every time I hear a rendition of that song, I’ll smile and think that no one will ever do it as well as the Berkley High School A Cappella Choir. On my next Picnic, Lightning day, I’ll close my eyes and think of their voices.

On Friday after school, Deedee picks up Kai and tells me to take a few hours to myself. I decide to wander through Borders bookstore for a while. I find a book called
Not Quite What I Was
Planning. Smith
magazine invited its subscribers to submit their own six-word memoirs. The book was inspired by an Ernest Hemingway line: “Baby shoes: for sale, never worn.” Hemingway proved that an entire story could be told in six words. The book is amazing. It’s funny and sad. I want to meet all of the people behind the quips. “I’m ten and have an attitude.” “I still make coffee for two.” “Accidentally killed cat. Fear anything delicate.” One of my personal favorites: “Birth, childhood, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence.”

Of course I think about my life in six words. What would it be? What six words would summarize the insanity of the last year of my life, let alone the first twenty-four? What first comes to mind is “Single widowed mother trying to recover.” But then, I reason, if I only had six words, would I choose the word
widow
? Would I allow that word to make up my identity? Just a half-dozen words to describe everything I’ve been through—would
widow
make the team? If I wanted to be as descriptive as possible, then certainly
widow
does explain a lot. I am a widow, at least in title. But after reading through some more six-word memoirs, I decide that if I only had six words, I wouldn’t take
widow
. “The female version of Indiana Jones.” That’s not mine, that’s an entry on page 29. It’s brilliant. I want to be friends with that girl. Maybe she’s a widow too and she just decided that her adventurous spirit was more important than her marital status.

A few days ago I was in the book room at school, which is a creepy room to begin with. It’s dark with only a small window. The metal bookshelves take up the majority of the room—and it isn’t really a room, either, it’s more like a large walk-in closet. Dust lines the black and maroon tiled floor and there is a very odd smell. It’s the smell of stale books. I had to go in the book room to get sixty copies of
Lord of the Flies
; my ninth-grade class
starts it next week. The book room holds all of the books we currently teach along with all of the books that we used to teach. As I walked through to find the Everbind stack of
Lord of the Flies
, I saw the stack of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic,
The Scarlet Letter
. I read
The Scarlet Letter
in Mrs. Madison’s class in tenth-grade English. But now, as a single mom myself, I feel a new connection to
The Scarlet Letter
.

The plot of
The Scarlet Letter
revolves around this woman, Hester Prynne, who has an illegitimate baby. Hester Prynne sleeps with this guy in town and we’re in Puritan America, so the town is really pissed at her. She has to serve a prison sentence while pregnant, and then after the baby is born she has to stand on a scaffold for a while with her infant. (Gotta love the Puritans.) Finally she is made to wear the letter
A
across her chest, which is meant to stand for adultress. First of all, this book is about a baby-mama. Hester never confesses who the father is, although the blood-sucking psycho residents of mid-seventeenth-century Massachusetts really want to know.

Even though the book was a tough read for me in the tenth grade, there was one part of it I remember enjoying. At one point Hawthorne describes how Hester no longer thought of her
A
as standing for adultress but rather for
able
. That’s all I remember, the word
able
. I like these moments. These are the moments that I really enjoy as a reader. It’s like in
The Color Purple
when Sofia tells Celie that if Harpo (Sofia’s husband, technically Celie’s son-in-law) beats Sofia again, she’s going to kill him. (“Now you want a dead son-in-law, Mrs. Celie? You just keep on advising him like you doing.”) Suddenly, literature turns into a good movie and you’re standing up in your seat, smiling and clapping in your head. You wish at some point in your life you get to tell someone how you really feel about them. It makes you wish that you had the courage to redefine what
your letter stood for. So, looking at the gray, beaten copies of
The Scarlet Letter
, I started to think about myself. I have a big
W
sewed across myself. I am a widow. My title is Widow. Not Mrs. or Miss, but Widow. Not married or divorced, but Widow. But what else could my
W
stand for? Wise? Not quite. Wonderful? Once in a while. Willing? I think about this. What’s my new
W
word? What’s my nonwidow six-word memoir?

My FMG sits in one of the big comfy leather chairs at Borders. Her eyes are closed and her head is tilted back. She’s wearing a big black puffy coat and sweatpants. I ask her what her six-word memoir was when she was raising her children. Without even taking a moment to think or use her fingers to count out words, she says with her eyes closed, “Leave me alone for five minutes.”