Want, стр. 29

have children; we see each other much less often now. Most of them have money or have partners who make money. One bought a brownstone with her partner’s trust fund and spent a year doing it over; another took a year off of work to try to write a book, moving in with her corporate-lawyer boyfriend, spent three months with him abroad. When both my children were born these women were kind and generous in ways that continually shocked me. They brought us dinner, took our trash out. They sat with me in university offices as I pumped milk.

They don’t know about the bankruptcy. I worry already that I exhaust them. There is no fixing the place that we’re in, no saying something that might make it better, so I don’t tell them, and, often, when they ask me how I am, I just say I’m tired and get quiet.

One of my friends, the one who took the year off—who is lovely, younger than me, quadrilingual, who is planning a wedding and, when she talks about the wedding, turns away from me and addresses the other women in the room in a way that makes me think she doesn’t trust that I’d have much to say about dresses or floral arrangements or how she might do her hair—she brings an acquaintance of ours to this dinner, another woman who is very wealthy, whom our quadrilingual friend describes whenever she brings her up as elegant, just so elegant. She has some great job in which she works from home a couple hours a day and makes some absurd amount of money because she’s smarter than nearly every other person that she works with and they think the work she does should take all day.

This place sounds awful, says this woman I know least well of all the women, speaking of my job.

I nod, then shake my head, not sure what to say.

I keep looking at my friends, wondering if they feel equally annoyed by nearly everything this woman’s saying. She also has a baby, the only one besides me, except she has a full-time nanny. Except, she says, she sends her husband to their country cottage with the baby every weekend so that she can get a break.

You should leave, this woman says about my job. It sounds so awful.

She wears tight, high-waisted jeans and a tucked-in black T-shirt. She has a shock of white-blond hair and she’s lined her eyes on top.

I can’t leave, I say.

She thinks I mean because I can’t leave the students, which is not untrue, but mostly, I can’t leave because we wouldn’t be able to pay our rent.

This woman sighs this big, long sigh that I think is supposed to be a sort of compliment-slash-show-of-solidarity between us. I know that if I were to sit with her by ourselves and talk a long time I’d probably like her. My quadrilingual friend is kind and brilliant and exacting and I trust she likes this woman because she is too. But I don’t have the space to sit and talk with her, to listen to and try to like her, so I sit and I allow myself to hate her, because I’m tired and it’s easy. I look at my friends around the table and wonder what they’d do if I stood up and I hit her.

You’re a hero, she says.

No I’m not.

Why do you stay, though? asks the Chilean writer a day later; her questions I don’t mind because I’ve decided that I like her. It can’t be only the money.

I love them, I say. I can’t say it without feeling like some bullshit movie that’s supposed to make you feel good, some bullshit movie that perpetuates the narrative that black and brown kids need earnest white people to rescue them.

The Chilean writer smirks at me.

I’m good at it, I say.

The kids are smart and, maybe more importantly, they’re children. They’re teenagers, eager, malleable, and thoughtful. I get to ask them questions, talk to them, I get to make them think. It’s thrilling in all the minutes that it’s going well and I think maybe, every third or eighteenth minute, that they’re learning something. It’s thrilling when they listen, thrilling when they argue and they think. It’s thrilling, but also, I’m embarrassed by how much I love them, by how little it is they’re getting from me, how whatever I give them isn’t anywhere close to what they need. I hate every time that someone says how good it is, my teaching these kids, because I’m embarrassed that I thought it might be too at first. That after years of fighting to get to be a college teacher, I was still so often shocked by how little my students needed or even wanted what I had to give. That I came to this school partially because I thought helping would feel good, because I thought I had something to offer, here. That I should have known better, that intellectually, I did. That what my students do need—an obliteration of the same systems I grew up in, a burning down and re-creation of the spaces that I relied on all these years to keep me safe—I can’t do and don’t know how to.

We go on a field trip to the New York Botanical Garden train show on the Metro-North and we corral the kids onto one train and then another.

Why are we doing this shit? one of my kids asks me as we walk on a wooded, tree-lined path. It’s warmer than it’s been the past few weeks and sunny.

It’s a gorgeous day, I say.

I know, she says.

This lady makes us do this shit because it’s for rich white people, says another student.

“This lady” is the CEO of this school where I teach. I shrug and do not talk because I do not think that they are wrong.

We watch a video about the making of the train show.

All I fucking do is ride the train,