Radio Belly Page 7

  BY THE END of your first month your students are ready for sentences. You hang noun and verb and adjective lists all over the walls of your classroom. You write “Subject Verb Object” on the board and then leap from one word list to another, guiding your students through the anatomy of a sentence. At times, standing at the front of class with your mouth stretched into a hideous yawn, waiting for a student to speak, you imagine the right word dangling on the end of a string way down inside you. If a student is really struggling, fishing around desperately for a word, you can feel it being tugged up through you. It scrapes your throat. You gag. Your tongue bucks and then, as if by magic, the word arrives fully formed in their mouths. You applaud, and then turn to wipe your eyes with your sleeve.

  The more they speak, the more you sacrifice yourself, that old teacher’s trick. “Describe me!” you instruct, and the sentences come rushing forward: Mrs. Teacher is ample/corpulent/spherical/abundant. According to one boy whose father is a dairy farmer, Mrs. Teacher is soft like cow belly. This is the day you write “taboo” on the board and give a short lecture—your first—about how people politely describe one another in America. They glom onto the word. Taboo: pronounced “ta-BOOH!” It makes them giggle every time.

  Almost as soon as your students are speaking freely, something takes hold of your voice. You try to speak, but it snags at the back of your throat.

  “It is bugs,” Mr. Bruce says when he hears you coughing. In the past weeks the air has grown thick with them: gnats, no-see-ums and smaller bugs too. Walking home they coat your arms and legs. They form a thick bug-paste in the corners of your eyes.

  “It’s nothing,” you tell Mr. Bruce. “Just a tickle.”

  IT’S THE END of your second month. You have given them sentence structure and vocabulary. You have given them voice and freedom, but your students still can’t form opinions about any of the speech topics.

  Your voice is reedy and thin now, but day after day you explain about American problems—about how hard it is for obese people to fit on airplanes, about all the high school students who drive drunk and all their angry mothers, about how people with melanoma have to get skin from their thighs grafted onto their noses. Night after night you ask them to form their own opinions about these things, but they always return empty-handed, saying only, “I think what you think, Mrs. Teacher.”

  Instead of American problems, they want to know about hotdogs and California and shopping malls with indoor roller coasters. You end up giving lengthy, sideways-sliding speeches. You start out talking about Disneyland and end up talking about tolerance, equality, democracy.

  They always rein you in again though, interrupting to ask, “And what about ice cream? How many flavours?” or “And the shoes, even red ones?” or they jump up from their seats, cinching their pants tight around their legs, asking, “American jeans are even this much tight?”

  You teach them the word because and they are suddenly speaking in long chains of logic that stretch away without end: It is good to study English because it makes you smart. It is good to be smart because you go to Harvard. Still you have to tell them what to say on either side of because.

  “Harvard is good because—” They stop, look up at you.

  “Because it just is,” you say.

  You teach them other “glue words” for sticking two ideas together. They brighten every time they use one: Study-ing is good BUT! it is hard. It is hard YET! it is fun. You can suddenly imagine them sitting in Cambridge coffee shops wearing tight jeans and red shoes, absorbed by their own contradictions.

  Some days you snap your ruler across your desk. “You must have some opinions. You must feel one way or another,” you say, but they can’t decide whether it is bad to drive drunk or good to wear sunscreen. They don’t care about race relations or recycling, about the paparazzi or pesticide use. It is all good. It is all bad. It is all the same.

  You go to Mr. Bruce.

  “Too young for opyons. No such thing as opyon here,” he says.

  “That’s ridiculous!” you argue. “An opyon is just a strong feeling. Everyone has strong feelings!”

  He pulls a translation dictionary down from a high shelf, flips to the right page and passes it to you. Sure enough, the English entries leap from Opiate to Opossum.

  “See?” he says, “No opyon here. Opyon is Amican.”

  You start to tell him that even if there isn’t a word for it, the concept still exists, that even if the concept doesn’t exist, it should, that opyons are a basic human right, but you notice he is staring at your mouth, looking so intently at it that his own mouth is twitching. You back out of the room.

  AT HOME THAT night you write a letter to the people who designed the test.

  To Whom It May Concern, you begin.

  You cross that out.

  Dear Sir or Madam, you begin again, I am concerned that your test may favour students who share a specific set of—A specific set of what? You can’t seem to locate the phrase.

  You tear that letter up, and the next and the next.

  Dear Test Makers, you finally write, My students sleep on dirt floors. They don’t have shoes and have never heard of the British royal family. How do you propose I prepare them for Speech Topic #7 (Monarchies undermine democracy: agree or disagree)?

  While you are folding the letter, a mosquito—there are so many of them now—gets caught under your hand. It smears red and yellow across the page, limbs flattened out like a pressed flower. Beneath the mosquito you add: P.S. For your information, some students don’t have opyons on American problems. They actually don’t.

  WITH THE TEST fast approaching, the other teachers start coming to work early and staying late, occasionally keeping students into the night. You suspect some teachers haven’t been home in days. In his anxiety, Mr. Bruce has launched a school-improvement project. He has recruited some of the village men to add more tin signs to the outside of the building, and there is an endless stream of supplies flowing into the school basement, even after dark. The whole village seems agitated, aflutter. Inspired by all this industry, you begin to make detailed lesson plans for the rest of your stay.

  Attendance starts to slip. Your students are needed at home. There are sick goats and dry wells and vegetable blights. They come and go as they please, but you decide not to involve Mr. Bruce. In the movies, attendance problems are a defining moment in any teacher’s career. You’ve been expecting this, even hoping for it in a strange way.

  IN THE END, you agree to the American names as a ploy to lure your students back. And how could you resist once they start pounding their desks, chanting “Amican names, Amican names, Amican names”? You have all the respect in the world for their given names and you really have tried to get those names straight, but their language has five tones, all in the nose. In class whenever you ask Pin Pon to stand, six of them rise. In the end, American names are just far more practical.

  On the day you finally concede, you are writing a list on the board—Jennifer and John and Susan and Sean—and explaining that a name is a very personal thing when a fight breaks out among a group of girls who, apparently, all want to be called Madonna. It’s the same thing on the boys’ side of the room. Three of them who want to be called Rambo are jabbing each other with pencils. They are rabid, fierce. There are nosebleeds and splinters.

  Once you finally calm them down, you manage to think of ten other timeless names and then hold a lottery. This is how your students come to be named Cyndi and Tiffany and Bono and Rocky. There is a Janet and a Michael, an Elvis and a Sinead, a Whitney and a Prince. The only one who doesn’t participate in the lottery is the shy manure-smelling boy. He wants to be called Clong—the sound of a cowbell in the morning.

  By the time the naming is settled, you can hear the other classes being let out. Mr. Bruce is pacing the hall. His shoes against the floor sound like H
arvard-Harvard-Harvard.

  YOUR STUDENTS GROW into their new names immediately. The girls start wearing their hair down. They stand a little taller and thrust their hips out when they walk. They wave to the boys using just their fingertips. And the boys have changed too. Even Rocky and Rambo are softer, more readable. During class you can see the emotions flicker across their faces—now lust, now boredom, now anger, now angst.

  You begin to detect certain attendance patterns—the same boy-girl pairs absent on the same days. You try lectur-ing them on the importance of education above all else—even love. You remind them about Harvard, about the jobs they will one day get, the things they will be able to buy, but even the wildest shopping fantasies can’t keep them all in the classroom.

  THE AIR IS soupy with bugs now, and there is something else, a taste you can’t quite place. Because it takes such effort to catch your breath, you wheel in Mr. Bruce’s small TV and VCR. You will have your students watch key scenes from the medical drama they all love: the one where the young doctor gives a speech about losing her scholarship, the one where the paramedics debate resuscitating a pedophile, the one where the wife-doctor stands up to the mistress-doctor. Together you will draw a crude map of each scene on the board and then have them re-enact it. A multimedia classroom: your best idea yet!

  When it comes time to map the scenes, you discover the subtitles they were reading told a much different story. In their scenes the young doctor was going off to war, the paramedics were faced with resuscitating an enemy soldier, the wife-doctor discovered her co-worker was an undercover spy.

  You know you should lecture them about propaganda, about government censorship and subduing the masses, but you feel as if all the air has been punched out of you. Besides, they are excited, flushed, raring to go. You sit and watch as they run through the scenes without you. For the first time they are standing firm with an opinion: they will go off to war, they will not resuscitate the enemy, spies should be punished. Your more advanced students begin emoting. See how they bite their lips and run their hands through their hair? See how their chins tremble when they look off into the distance? They seem more American than ever.

  At the end of class you gather them in a huddle.

  “Now I understand,” says Sinead. “Opyon is like acting!”

  “It is like battle!” says Rocky.

  “Like small war,” says Rambo.

  “Like pretend!” says Janet.

  You think of certain nightspots and coffee shops at home and can’t bring yourself to disagree with their findings.

  “Congratulations,” you say. “We really broke through today. Now we can move beyond small talk!”

  “To what?” asks Clong. “Big talk?”

  THAT EVENING, WALKING home under a lingering pink sun-set, you vow to dive deep into Big Talk. You want to really find out who your students are, what they desire, what they’re most afraid of. You will ask about their recurring dreams and then do fun partner-work involving Jungian analysis. You will get them to draw their feelings, to describe their families.

  But in the morning when you get to school and write the word “fear” on the board, Rambo rises to speak on behalf of the boys. “We have no fear,” he says and the rest of them bang their fists on their desks in a show of unity.

  So they do have strong opinions!

  “Excellent!” you say, crossing out “fear” and writing “war” above it. “What does war mean exactly?” you ask. “Why do some countries have wars and others not? What exactly is the purpose of a war? Is it useful? Is it senseless and violent?”

  They can no longer follow. They are clamped down, their mouths pulled into mean little stitches, arms crossed tight over their chests. They have nothing more to say.

  After a full hour of prickly silence, you come up with the mask experiment.

  It seems like a great idea at first, but once the boys are lined up against the blackboard, wearing the girls’ masks and looking at you with black seething eyes, once the very air has turned sour, you start to question the whole endeavour.

  “Gender-role flexibility is the backbone of a healthy society!” you say, but you’re only explaining your actions to yourself.

  You had hoped for catharsis and group hugs and that certain kind of conversation that can only be compared to a river: rushing and fluid and of startling depth. You had hoped to crack them open.

  “Ta-BOOH?” you ask. “Too much?”

  Nobody laughs. The bell rings and they all file out. Many won’t return.

  THE AIR IS SWARMING, filled with flying ants, locusts and pale moths that move down the street like a fluttering fog. You have to duck into doorways while they pass. All those busy wings sound like sand poured from a great height.

  When you ask him why all the bugs, Mr. Bruce says, “Refugees,” but you can only assume he means migrants. Insect migrations: you saw a nature show on that once. Or maybe it’s something more sinister. The air is so hot, so sweet and choking, perhaps someone is spraying pesticides in the next valley.

  One day out of desperation, you tie a T-shirt over your nose and mouth to walk home. On the way, old men and women, the same ones you’ve passed every day since your arrival, look up from their chores for the first time. Their eyes lock onto yours, something like warmth passing between you. By the time you get home, you’ve cried clean trails across your cheeks. You find bugs pooled in your ears. You hadn’t realized how invisible you’ve felt, how faceless and lonely. You quickly fashion your own mask from the sleeve of an old shirt. You will wear it everywhere but inside the classroom.

  ONCE YOU START wearing the mask, and with just a month until the test, your students trickle back. The ones who have the farthest to walk stop going home between classes. At night they sleep huddled together at the bottom of the stairs. Many of their mothers have joined them there. After school, the women gather at the top of the stairs as usual, only now they are friendly. Now when you step over the threshold to go home, they come forward, clutching your arms and fingers. Their hands are cracked like leather. Their masks puff in and out with their chatter.

  Whitney is the first to translate: “My mom wants to have you for dinner.”

  “Over for dinner?”

  “Yes, over.”

  And so Whitney’s mom is the first to pull you down the dusty road toward her home.

  IN THE YARD, the men are sitting around a fire, telling jokes. They are spitting and polishing empty glass bottles.

  “Not for Mrs. Teacher,” Whitney says, leading you to the outdoor kitchen where you are introduced to the women and children. You help the children dish pickles and powders into an array of tiny bowls and then hand them off to Nug, a woman who looks about thirty, but acts about six. “Her brain never grew up,” Whitney explains. Nug is the only woman not wearing a mask and she acts as a messenger between the men and women. Everywhere she goes her feet slap the ground, sending up dust clouds. Something about her broad, relentless smile makes you uneasy.

  When it’s time to eat, the men push a pile of branches aside to reveal a deep cooking hole. Fat sizzles off the rocks below as they hoist the meat up on long sticks. Nug squeals and claps her hands. For a moment, propped upright, the goat looks alive. It still has hide and bones, eyes and ears. It looks surprised, mid-stride, like it accidentally fell into a cooking hole.

  When the men have finished serving themselves, Nug brings the remaining meat over to where the women are seated on the ground. You have already untied your mask and taken your first bite by the time you realize your mistake. Looking around, you see the other women have loosened the bottoms of their masks to create a kind of curtain. They smuggle their food up and under, up and under, like secret cargo. You quickly retie your mask, but you can feel the men looking at you across the distance.

  AFTER DINNER, THE men go back to their bottle-polishing
and the women tuck in close. They are trying to tell you something, speaking softly, shush, shush, shush. Their hands are in your hair. The youngest ones cradle your curls delicately as if each one is a daisy chain. You feel protected, forgiven. And you feel something else too, an absence of desire, the sensation of being just exactly who and where you are.

  You watch the men fill those bottles with a murky liquid. They are pushing rags into the bottles, sealing them off, and then Whitney’s mom is next to you, reaching for your face.

  “She wants a name, too,” Whitney translates. “A Hollywood one.”

  You shake your palm in the air, the universal decline, but the women shake their palms back at you, mistaking it for a kind of wave.

  “Please. It is great honour,” Whitney says.

  When you finally name her Farrah, Whitney’s mom folds at the waist, weeping with joy. The women press against you, running their cold fingers up and down your arms. In a moment small hands are wiggling the earrings out of your ears. They are lifting the bracelets off your wrists, loosening the buckles on your sandals, tickling your skin. You catch a faint whiff of gasoline and your scalp hums. The women are all around you, shushing and clucking, oohing and aahing. They are slipping your shoes off, sliding their own cracked and dusty feet over the smooth leather soles.

  AFTER THE FIRST dinner invitation, the rest of the mothers want you to visit, too. They wait for you at the top of the stairs, arguing over whose turn it is. This is how you spend your last weeks. You eat, and then name your hostess Raquel or Loni or Olivia or Goldie. You give all of your belongings away and then float home barefoot under a blood-red sunset, wearing someone else’s dress.

  Lying in bed at night, smelling like meat and fire, you can barely remember how you used to fill your days at home. You try to picture your last apartment, but you can’t even get as far as the four pastel walls. Was there a window? A door? In your mind’s eye you try to picture yourself living that life, but the different parts of you—arms, legs, feet, head—always drift away from each other, like oil on water.