Woodmere

Laurie
Woodmere
Shelbourne Falls, VT, March 31, 2009

The promt is to write a story in four paragraphs. In the first paragraph you write the end, in the second a moment of revelation, in the third the beginning, in the fourth a moment of failure to understand.

Susan is sitting on my left, and we are facing the headmaster, Alan Bernstein. When I address the students, I refer to him as Alan. I’m wearing the black pants and red snake skin belt Lana gave me and a top that falls off the shoulders from my friend Rebecca. I’m in Hessel Hall, in other people’s clothes and holding a microphone like a standup, “How do you do ladies and germs.” After I speak, we repair to Alan’s office, and he introduces me to Susan, who is one of the English teachers. In a voice crackling with enthusiasm, she says she is advising the sustainability club and guiding students to New York. She recalls working at the Public Theater and how Joe Papp would come in every day with a new idea he’d make happen. I get a flash of Papp with his thatch of hair and big Jewish-uncle grasp, holding the world in his fist like a thick corned beef sandwich. Susan says she would like to write with her husband. She would like to go to a café and let words come and read them out loud. Her blond hair is swept up in the back, and her head is tilted to the side as she pictures the two of them in a café listening to Bing Crosby sing jazz. “I knew you two would like each other,” Alan says, ready to move on to his next appointment. Women have organized my visit, women in the outer offices. I embrace him and Susan in farewell, thinking about when I was a kid, sitting across from Miles K. Wren, the headmaster who wore hand-made, three-piece suits. The children of millionaires went to Woodmere Academy, the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, real estate developers, and Wall Street financiers. When I visit the office of Miles K. Wren, whose parents come from China, he looks over my head. He’s not interested in where I’m from.

I am holding the microphone like a comedian in a club, telling a sea of faces about Woodmere back in the day. I’m in Hessel Hall, and behind me is the stage with the set for Once Upon a Mattress. I’m looking at a sea of faces, and many are African-American and Korean, and there are South Asians in the mix, and I’m thinking how different this is from then. We were white. Everyone was white except for two black teachers, a woman who taught gym in the Middle School and Lawrence Oliver, who taught English my junior and senior years and liked to watch play rehearses. Hessel Hall is unchanged, the rows of dark, burnished oak pews, the vaulted ceiling, the two carpeted aisles leading to a marble lobby. I’m telling the students that these teachers taught me about the Civil Rights Movement. I’m saying that feeling recognized is more important than anything you learn, and I’m thinking this must have happened to me. I must have liked something about myself here, and I’m telling the students to do what they love and become artists if they want to and not care if it scares their parents. Their parents will get over it, and I’m surprised that all these years I have thought this place was an envelope for pain I see it wasn’t only that. I remember rehearsing You Can’t Take it With You, and Goodbye My Fancy, and Bell Book and Candle. I am waiting in the wings for my turn to speak.

I follow directions from Mapquest, and it’s not as easy as it looks, because you don’t know the order of the streets and when to get into the turning lane. But as I’m driving to Woodmere Academy I remember the roads. I remember driving with Jerry Needleman, the older brother of a girl in my class, and pushing him off me when he took me to a dark street somewhere near here. I’m remembering that night because I’d forgotten it had happened until suddenly it came back that I was sometimes afraid and had to beg. I turn onto Woodmere Boulevard and there is the giant, red brick mansion with its curving driveway. I park and walk up the Senior Steps, although there aren’t as many as I remember. Alan is waiting inside, a warm faced man with round cheeks, and he greets me with a hug. I’m ushered into offices, and a woman takes my coat. Another says she will print out documents for the class, and then I’m swept to a room in a library built after my time. The students are sitting in a semicircle waiting for me to entertain them, and I take a seat with them, and I’m in my comfort zone. I’m not at play rehearsals as a refuge from the rest of my life. I’m not living with my parents in Long Beach or Manhattan and commuting to Woodmere. I’m not afraid that my life has already been blighted, that people can sense my unfitness for happiness and that’s why Jerry Needleman drove me to that street. I’m speaking to kids who want me to distract them from the frustrating or nauseating or dizzying sensation of being fifteen or sixteen and peering over the lip of life.

I say that memory is the enemy of story and tell them about a memoir I wrote about my mother who died a year ago. I say I thought I’d nailed it but when I read it several months later I saw it was a my-mommy-didn’t-love-me-enough piece. I explain how I went back and invented love for my mother as a way of adding stakes and that in the process of inventing love I’d discovered it. It’s the damnedest thing, how the practice of the writer makes emotions more available to the author. The students are watching me, and they exchange lively remarks about their favorite scars, the subject of an exercize they’ve done. The question of whether I will win them is answered, and I begin to feel tired in my arms and shoulders. My legs feel heavy, and I look out the window at the sports field, and I remember being fifteen or sixteen and handing out slices of oranges to the boys who are playing football. Jerry Needleman is one, one of the rich boys with a red sports car, and he is slight and looks like a turtle in his shell of padding. I remember slicing oranges in the cafeteria, it is some kind of tradition, the girls giving oranges to the boys, and it’s a Saturday, and I am doing this thing, although I don’t really feel part of it. I am playing the role of someone who belongs here. I’m able to be here and not here at the same time, and I can enter this state at will and I think of it as becoming balsa wood, something light that when you bite it you leave teeth impressions in. In those days, I enter this state quite often.