Helen conducts section (HSZ version)
Helen stared at the Dead Kennedys logo carved in the tabletop in front of her, the only piece of graffiti legible from where she was standing. Hadn't Jello Biafra gone to UCSZ? Maybe he had inscribed it there personally. Her mouth hurt because she was clenching it so hard, trying to stop a yawn in mid-eruption. The classroom was terribly hot and crowded. A ring of students were seated at the four tables arranged in a square, and around them gathered still more, standing or sitting against the walls of the room. The multitude of bodies made the room seem far smaller than it was. Flies buzzed against the windows and occasionally flew around the people in the outer circle before they were shooed away.
As always, most of the section seemed lost in half-attention, looking out the window at the corn-flower blue winter sky, doodling in their notebooks, or even catching up on their reading. Helen wished she hadn't done all of those things so many times in UCSZ classes so she could feel more justified in her irritation. She glanced around and took stock of her students one by one. Helen had never really realized, from a teacher’s perspective, just how pathetically obvious it was who was paying attention, and who wasn’t. As a student, she had always felt like part of an anonymous, undifferentiated mass, but now she knew that her teachers and professors must have taken note of her boredom all these years. You had to have a pretty thick skin to be a teacher-thicker than what Helen wore. She just wished someone, anyone, would say something. Other than Peak.
As usual, Peak’s voice filled the room, seeming to drown out not only the possibility of others’ speaking, but thinking as well. His words were delivered with such confidence, such overwhelming conviction that the world needed to hear them, and with such complete disregard and awareness of the tedium and torpor they induced in those unlucky enough to still be paying attention, that it infuriated Helen, but she had no conception of how to convince him to shut up that wouldn’t make the class think she was on some kind of power trip.
Besides Peak, the other member of the section likely to be paying attention at any given moment was Michael Sullivan, a freshman who looked younger than that, like he had just wandered into the section from a local high school; though possibly not a high school in this decade. Helen could feel Michael's eyes on her most of the time, though he rarely spoke. She had tried making eye contact with him a few times just for the hell of it, but he was too shy and always looked down, pretending to be absorbed in writing his notes. Michael took by far the most notes in the class. It showed in his papers, which were detailed and well-written, though a little dry. She thought of trying to draw him out somehow, but all she could think of was to call on him, since he never opened his mouth voluntarily, and just the thought of turning that power-mad gave her the creeps. She wondered, too, if, there was something more than just scholarly interest in his gaze. She got that vibe, and usually when she felt something like, it turned out be real. Especially when she didn't want it to be.
“It's like last summer when I was back-packing in Guatemala, Peak was going on. You would go to these villages with, like, no TV or radio, and it was like, man, you really don't need that stuff.”
Peak brought up his trip to Central America during fall quarter at least once a section. Of all the indignities the United States had inflicted on Central America, she thought that three months of Peak might have been the worst. Helen glanced around the room, to gauge her section's interest in the latest volume of the "Life & Travels of Peak". Directly across from Helen's position at the center of the table parallel with the chalkboard, sat Maria Gaier. As usual, Maria wore a disdainful look, the same look she wore during most of the conversations in their section. Maria was the oldest woman in the section, older than Helen by about two years. She wore a simple cotton print dress, which seemed in a curious way to emphasize her advantage in both age and height over Helen. Compared to her, Helen felt like a high schooler in her blue sweater, white jeans and sneakers.
Maria was a fifth-year senior taking the class because it was the only she could get into which satisfied her major requirements. Helen knew this because she had talked to Maria after the first section meeting. Helen had been impressed by some of her comments in the first section, and thought it a good idea to cultivate her acquaintance-as she might be a good ally. As the quarter had gone on, though, Helen's opinion of Maria had, like her opinion of so many of her students, only gotten worse and worse. Maria's attitude was patronizing, and Helen got the feeling that only her profound sense of sisterhood prevented Maria from letting Helen just how lame a section leader she really was. Also, she had stopped being a good contributor, as if the quality of discourse in the section was not up to a high enough standard for her to take part in. Such arrogance drove Helen crazy. Especially from a woman; and a woman who claimed allegiance to the feminist cause.
Their eyes met for a second, and Helen hoped that it would challenge Maria to break into Peak's monologue. But no such luck. Instead, Maria just averted her eyes to the window facing the Terra Nueva bay.
“So I was like talking to this guy who was some kind of, like, tour guide, or shaman, and he was telling me about climbing the volcano at night, and I was like "yeah, okay, cool, I'll do that". But then he totally flaked, so I just went off into the jungle by myself. I saw a tarantula, which was intense, because that's my like, totem animal.”
In the micro-second pause that followed, Helen interrupted firmly, aware that she was in danger of completely losing control of the situation. “Thank you, Peak,”
“No prob,” he said. Helen could tell he had only been pausing to take a breath, gathering himself to launch into the next chapter of the saga, in which he ended up falling asleep in a clearing (baked out of his gourd, Helen was sure) and waking up covered with stinging red ants. Just imagining Peak being stung half to death was almost worth listening to him tell the story, but not quite. He gave her a winning smile, as if were granting her a huge favor by letting her break in. Helen picked up the chalk and, instead of answering the question of whether it was possible to kill someone with a piece of chalk by flinging it at Peak's huge dome of dark curly hair, turned to the chalkboard. Peak's tale had made her think about geography, and the paper she had written for the class that had gotten her into this mess in the first place, so she wrote:
China USA
And underlined both.
“These are the two worlds of China Men.”
“What about Hawaii?” one student asked from the corner between the two windowed walls.
“That's part of the US.”
“I think it's like where the two worlds collide,” another girl said.
Helen nodded, amazed that actual intellectual discourse seemed to be occurring in her section.
“That's great, Jennifer.”
As Jennifer continued on, Helen wrote Hawaii on the chalkboard between the USA and China, drew a wiggly circle around it in a vague attempt to replicate what she remembered the island of Hawaii looking like on a map. She had only been there once, and it hadn't been for vacation. She and her mother had spent two hours in Honolulu, changing flights. It had been the first stop on the journey that had taken them from Guam to Minnesota, to begin their new, husband and father-less life. She remembered how sweet the air had smelled, like a bouquet of flowers, instead of a wet blanket of rotting lettuce like it had in Guam. She and her mother had stopped there to transfer between the military transport from Guam and the United flight that would take them to LA, after which they would connect to Minneapolis-their final destination on the far side of the world.
Helen and her mother had ridden the wiki-wiki bus between terminals, since the bus from the Air Force base had dropped them off at the wrong one. Unlike the Air Force bases, where people were constantly telling you where to go and what to do, in the civilian world you were pretty much left to figure it out for yourself. Helen's mother had tried to cheer her up by pointing out the silly, sing-song name of the bus. But Helen had been too scared, and too determined to be grown-up and not show she was afraid, to enjoy the name and had just scowled, said "yeah, that's so cute, mom". Her mother suddenly looked so sad-her eyes had started to water, and Helen felt a chasm open, the world disintegrate, surrounded by fat and happy tourists laughing excitedly, about to begin a week in paradise. Helen had hated them all and wanted to shout "can't you see my mom is sad?!". She hated their huge butts in shorts big enough to be used as tents, plastic flower leis and Polaroid instant cameras around their neck, children crying because they hadn't been bought a present in the airport gift shop, not because their parents had just split up, and their mother had told them they would never see their father again, that she should never see her father again, or want to see him, and if she did it wouldn't be allowed, and she might be slapped just for asking; and they were going to Minnesota where it snowed in the winter and if you got locked out of your house you would die from the cold.
Helen had wanted so badly to stay overnight in Honolulu, to see the stuff she had seen on TV-the beaches, surfing, and volcanoes. She wanted to see Hawaii 5-0. But they had no time, her mother said, not enough money to stay even one night. Maybe another time. When they had moved to Alta Lara and their financial situation had somewhat improved, her mother had talked about it, but they always ended up going somewhere else. Meanwhile, Sarah went there seemingly at the drop of a hat since her family had a timeshare in a condo on Maui. Jake and Todd Forrest had gone during senior year. Helen was invited but had to decline, since she had to save her money for her freshman year at UCSZ.
Helen forced herself to stop ruminating, aware that Jennifer had finished.
“But what does Hawaii really mean as a place?” Helen asked. “Isn't it kind of a stop, on the way to someplace else?”
“Not for the people who lived there, before the white man came and killed them all,” said the short-haired girl. “Hawaii was their home,” she said plaintively.
Everyone in the section nodded and murmured in agreement. Helen had the distinct feeling that they all felt she had made a terrible faux pas.
“Well,” Helen said, “that's true, Brianne.”
“It's Brionne,” the girl said.
“Sorry,” Helen said, to which Helen added "stupid little valley girl PC-wannabe bitch" in her mind. Now, instead of her jaw, her teeth were starting to hurt from gritting them so much.
The pause that followed was so awkward it seemed to suck every possible idea out of Helen's brain. She waited for Peak to fill it with one of his idiot monologues, but he seemed to have fallen inexplicably silent. She glanced at him, and he was apparently so absorbed in his next masterpiece of doodling that he couldn't be bothered to participate. Helen licked her lips and suddenly realized what it means to have stage fright. Someone coughed and paper rustled. All Helen could think of was the scene on that bus and how impossibly lost she had felt, and after that, how terrifyingly dark the flight had seemed. She had tried to sleep, but instead she just stared out the oval window at the black sky, infinite darkness above and below, no moon, no stars, no anything. Just a black void that had seemed to swallow Helen, her mother, and everyone else on the plane. It had been such a relief when she had dozed off, then came awake to see bands of red, pink and yellow light in the east-reassurance that the world hadn't come to an end after all.
Movement, unexpected movement, that Helen would have thought was a student raising their hand if it hadn't come from a table with some of her most somnolent students, caught Helen's eye. She thought at first it was just a fly being swatted away, but then she saw it was one of the freshmen, Michael, slowly raising his hand, and looking as if he would take it back down at the slightest opportunity. Helen didn't intend to give him that chance.
“Michael, right?” She smiled at him.
“But they came from other parts of Polynesia,” Michael said. The Hawaiian islands were only settled for a few hundred years before Captain Cook d- sailed there.
“Thank you, Michael,” Helen said with relief. “That's a good point.”
Michael smiled shyly, the first time Helen could remember him smiling. That smile disappeared the second Peak's voice came booming across the room.
“But those people were peaceful, man. They didn't even have, like, weapons.”
A few of the other students murmured in agreement. Helen saw Michael frown in disbelief. It seemed like he was about to say something, but held back. Helen had no idea who was right, and she didn't think there was much point to getting in an argument about history, which she could just see going round and round in circles with no resolution. Instead, she tried to bring the conversation back to the book.
“What about the women?” Helen asked. “Where are they happiest?”
As always, most of the section seemed lost in half-attention, looking out the window at the corn-flower blue winter sky, doodling in their notebooks, or even catching up on their reading. Helen wished she hadn't done all of those things so many times in UCSZ classes so she could feel more justified in her irritation. She glanced around and took stock of her students one by one. Helen had never really realized, from a teacher’s perspective, just how pathetically obvious it was who was paying attention, and who wasn’t. As a student, she had always felt like part of an anonymous, undifferentiated mass, but now she knew that her teachers and professors must have taken note of her boredom all these years. You had to have a pretty thick skin to be a teacher-thicker than what Helen wore. She just wished someone, anyone, would say something. Other than Peak.
As usual, Peak’s voice filled the room, seeming to drown out not only the possibility of others’ speaking, but thinking as well. His words were delivered with such confidence, such overwhelming conviction that the world needed to hear them, and with such complete disregard and awareness of the tedium and torpor they induced in those unlucky enough to still be paying attention, that it infuriated Helen, but she had no conception of how to convince him to shut up that wouldn’t make the class think she was on some kind of power trip.
Besides Peak, the other member of the section likely to be paying attention at any given moment was Michael Sullivan, a freshman who looked younger than that, like he had just wandered into the section from a local high school; though possibly not a high school in this decade. Helen could feel Michael's eyes on her most of the time, though he rarely spoke. She had tried making eye contact with him a few times just for the hell of it, but he was too shy and always looked down, pretending to be absorbed in writing his notes. Michael took by far the most notes in the class. It showed in his papers, which were detailed and well-written, though a little dry. She thought of trying to draw him out somehow, but all she could think of was to call on him, since he never opened his mouth voluntarily, and just the thought of turning that power-mad gave her the creeps. She wondered, too, if, there was something more than just scholarly interest in his gaze. She got that vibe, and usually when she felt something like, it turned out be real. Especially when she didn't want it to be.
“It's like last summer when I was back-packing in Guatemala, Peak was going on. You would go to these villages with, like, no TV or radio, and it was like, man, you really don't need that stuff.”
Peak brought up his trip to Central America during fall quarter at least once a section. Of all the indignities the United States had inflicted on Central America, she thought that three months of Peak might have been the worst. Helen glanced around the room, to gauge her section's interest in the latest volume of the "Life & Travels of Peak". Directly across from Helen's position at the center of the table parallel with the chalkboard, sat Maria Gaier. As usual, Maria wore a disdainful look, the same look she wore during most of the conversations in their section. Maria was the oldest woman in the section, older than Helen by about two years. She wore a simple cotton print dress, which seemed in a curious way to emphasize her advantage in both age and height over Helen. Compared to her, Helen felt like a high schooler in her blue sweater, white jeans and sneakers.
Maria was a fifth-year senior taking the class because it was the only she could get into which satisfied her major requirements. Helen knew this because she had talked to Maria after the first section meeting. Helen had been impressed by some of her comments in the first section, and thought it a good idea to cultivate her acquaintance-as she might be a good ally. As the quarter had gone on, though, Helen's opinion of Maria had, like her opinion of so many of her students, only gotten worse and worse. Maria's attitude was patronizing, and Helen got the feeling that only her profound sense of sisterhood prevented Maria from letting Helen just how lame a section leader she really was. Also, she had stopped being a good contributor, as if the quality of discourse in the section was not up to a high enough standard for her to take part in. Such arrogance drove Helen crazy. Especially from a woman; and a woman who claimed allegiance to the feminist cause.
Their eyes met for a second, and Helen hoped that it would challenge Maria to break into Peak's monologue. But no such luck. Instead, Maria just averted her eyes to the window facing the Terra Nueva bay.
“So I was like talking to this guy who was some kind of, like, tour guide, or shaman, and he was telling me about climbing the volcano at night, and I was like "yeah, okay, cool, I'll do that". But then he totally flaked, so I just went off into the jungle by myself. I saw a tarantula, which was intense, because that's my like, totem animal.”
In the micro-second pause that followed, Helen interrupted firmly, aware that she was in danger of completely losing control of the situation. “Thank you, Peak,”
“No prob,” he said. Helen could tell he had only been pausing to take a breath, gathering himself to launch into the next chapter of the saga, in which he ended up falling asleep in a clearing (baked out of his gourd, Helen was sure) and waking up covered with stinging red ants. Just imagining Peak being stung half to death was almost worth listening to him tell the story, but not quite. He gave her a winning smile, as if were granting her a huge favor by letting her break in. Helen picked up the chalk and, instead of answering the question of whether it was possible to kill someone with a piece of chalk by flinging it at Peak's huge dome of dark curly hair, turned to the chalkboard. Peak's tale had made her think about geography, and the paper she had written for the class that had gotten her into this mess in the first place, so she wrote:
China USA
And underlined both.
“These are the two worlds of China Men.”
“What about Hawaii?” one student asked from the corner between the two windowed walls.
“That's part of the US.”
“I think it's like where the two worlds collide,” another girl said.
Helen nodded, amazed that actual intellectual discourse seemed to be occurring in her section.
“That's great, Jennifer.”
As Jennifer continued on, Helen wrote Hawaii on the chalkboard between the USA and China, drew a wiggly circle around it in a vague attempt to replicate what she remembered the island of Hawaii looking like on a map. She had only been there once, and it hadn't been for vacation. She and her mother had spent two hours in Honolulu, changing flights. It had been the first stop on the journey that had taken them from Guam to Minnesota, to begin their new, husband and father-less life. She remembered how sweet the air had smelled, like a bouquet of flowers, instead of a wet blanket of rotting lettuce like it had in Guam. She and her mother had stopped there to transfer between the military transport from Guam and the United flight that would take them to LA, after which they would connect to Minneapolis-their final destination on the far side of the world.
Helen and her mother had ridden the wiki-wiki bus between terminals, since the bus from the Air Force base had dropped them off at the wrong one. Unlike the Air Force bases, where people were constantly telling you where to go and what to do, in the civilian world you were pretty much left to figure it out for yourself. Helen's mother had tried to cheer her up by pointing out the silly, sing-song name of the bus. But Helen had been too scared, and too determined to be grown-up and not show she was afraid, to enjoy the name and had just scowled, said "yeah, that's so cute, mom". Her mother suddenly looked so sad-her eyes had started to water, and Helen felt a chasm open, the world disintegrate, surrounded by fat and happy tourists laughing excitedly, about to begin a week in paradise. Helen had hated them all and wanted to shout "can't you see my mom is sad?!". She hated their huge butts in shorts big enough to be used as tents, plastic flower leis and Polaroid instant cameras around their neck, children crying because they hadn't been bought a present in the airport gift shop, not because their parents had just split up, and their mother had told them they would never see their father again, that she should never see her father again, or want to see him, and if she did it wouldn't be allowed, and she might be slapped just for asking; and they were going to Minnesota where it snowed in the winter and if you got locked out of your house you would die from the cold.
Helen had wanted so badly to stay overnight in Honolulu, to see the stuff she had seen on TV-the beaches, surfing, and volcanoes. She wanted to see Hawaii 5-0. But they had no time, her mother said, not enough money to stay even one night. Maybe another time. When they had moved to Alta Lara and their financial situation had somewhat improved, her mother had talked about it, but they always ended up going somewhere else. Meanwhile, Sarah went there seemingly at the drop of a hat since her family had a timeshare in a condo on Maui. Jake and Todd Forrest had gone during senior year. Helen was invited but had to decline, since she had to save her money for her freshman year at UCSZ.
Helen forced herself to stop ruminating, aware that Jennifer had finished.
“But what does Hawaii really mean as a place?” Helen asked. “Isn't it kind of a stop, on the way to someplace else?”
“Not for the people who lived there, before the white man came and killed them all,” said the short-haired girl. “Hawaii was their home,” she said plaintively.
Everyone in the section nodded and murmured in agreement. Helen had the distinct feeling that they all felt she had made a terrible faux pas.
“Well,” Helen said, “that's true, Brianne.”
“It's Brionne,” the girl said.
“Sorry,” Helen said, to which Helen added "stupid little valley girl PC-wannabe bitch" in her mind. Now, instead of her jaw, her teeth were starting to hurt from gritting them so much.
The pause that followed was so awkward it seemed to suck every possible idea out of Helen's brain. She waited for Peak to fill it with one of his idiot monologues, but he seemed to have fallen inexplicably silent. She glanced at him, and he was apparently so absorbed in his next masterpiece of doodling that he couldn't be bothered to participate. Helen licked her lips and suddenly realized what it means to have stage fright. Someone coughed and paper rustled. All Helen could think of was the scene on that bus and how impossibly lost she had felt, and after that, how terrifyingly dark the flight had seemed. She had tried to sleep, but instead she just stared out the oval window at the black sky, infinite darkness above and below, no moon, no stars, no anything. Just a black void that had seemed to swallow Helen, her mother, and everyone else on the plane. It had been such a relief when she had dozed off, then came awake to see bands of red, pink and yellow light in the east-reassurance that the world hadn't come to an end after all.
Movement, unexpected movement, that Helen would have thought was a student raising their hand if it hadn't come from a table with some of her most somnolent students, caught Helen's eye. She thought at first it was just a fly being swatted away, but then she saw it was one of the freshmen, Michael, slowly raising his hand, and looking as if he would take it back down at the slightest opportunity. Helen didn't intend to give him that chance.
“Michael, right?” She smiled at him.
“But they came from other parts of Polynesia,” Michael said. The Hawaiian islands were only settled for a few hundred years before Captain Cook d- sailed there.
“Thank you, Michael,” Helen said with relief. “That's a good point.”
Michael smiled shyly, the first time Helen could remember him smiling. That smile disappeared the second Peak's voice came booming across the room.
“But those people were peaceful, man. They didn't even have, like, weapons.”
A few of the other students murmured in agreement. Helen saw Michael frown in disbelief. It seemed like he was about to say something, but held back. Helen had no idea who was right, and she didn't think there was much point to getting in an argument about history, which she could just see going round and round in circles with no resolution. Instead, she tried to bring the conversation back to the book.
“What about the women?” Helen asked. “Where are they happiest?”
Works
Recent Writing
- 1989 A Novel: Tim and April walk to the liquor store
- Volume III: Helen meets Roxy for coffee at the Fremont College coffee shop
- Volume III: Tim walks back from Contemporary American Fiction
- Volume III: Helen conducts section, can’t prevent Michael from being dissed
- Volume III: Helen conducts section (HSZ version)