On Brassard's Farm Read online

  We heard the Goslants before we saw them: raised voices, emphatic and angry sounding. Then we saw their house: two conjoined mobile homes that sagged in the middle. Someone had tacked on a front porch made of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting, and odd tar-paper-covered sheds stuck out at random angles. Next to the house stood a caravan-type mobile home and a newer-looking garage with two bays, one with the rolling door jammed at an angle and the other open to reveal heaped plastic bags, cardboard boxes, car parts, TVs, broken aluminum lawn chairs, piled as if they’d been flung blindly through the door.

  The yard was covered in random scatter: disemboweled snowmobiles, a toppled refrigerator, a sun-faded plastic kids’ minislide and wading pool. Piles of concrete blocks, stacks of firewood, a dilapidated rain-soaked couch, a rusted-out barbecue grill. The ground beneath was a mix of scrub grass and smaller trash. Torn plastic fluttered over the windows of the trailer. A big, shiny pickup truck and a couple of cars were parked up in the driveway.

  Two young men leaned against the side of the pickup, one of them looking bored and talking into his cell phone, the other arguing with a very obese middle-aged woman who stood on the front porch, shouting.

  “Give me the goddamned keys! I’m not going to say it again!”

  One of the young men, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, held out some keys. “Why don’t you come down and get them? Because you can’t move your lard-ass butt that far!”

  Off to the side, a pretty adolescent girl, maybe fifteen years old, yelled out in an acid voice, “Bobbie, I said GET your ASS over here!” This was to a toddler wearing only a paper diaper, who was teetering out toward Cat and me. “I said NOW!”

  We walked faster, wishing we were invisible. The yard exhaled the smell of mildew. We were embarrassed to witness a family argument, and frightened by the malevolence of the combatants.

  The obese woman started down the stairs toward the man with the car keys. “You don’t want to do this, Johnnie. You really don’t want to fucking go here, you little shit.”

  Johnnie laughed and tossed the keys in the air, caught them, and moved quickly around the truck as the woman came off the steps.

  Cat and I were abreast of the driveway by then, slinking by, looking forward but unavoidably glancing over at them. The young man on the cell phone put it away from his face long enough to stare defiantly back at us. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he snarled.

  “What did I SAY!” the girl snarled at the toddler. She had come forward and now grabbed its arm and jerked it so that the kid spun around. She dragged the child screaming back toward the house. “SHUT UP! Or I’ll give you a real good reason to cry!”

  Johnnie had gotten into the truck and fired it up, and the huge woman beat on the hood. “Don’t come home tonight, you little bastard. The door’ll be locked and all your shit will be out in the yard.”

  “Don’t fuck with my stuff, Ma. Don’t even think about it.”

  We were past the place by now, power walking, and couldn’t see them anymore. But a moment later, the truck roared up behind us, too close, and the cell-phone guy made moronic bug-eyes at us as they zoomed past.

  We didn’t say anything for a long time. I was nauseated and ashamed: My little paradise had revealed an ugly underside. The Goslants’ lives were deeply destitute in uncountable ways, lived without any apparent control of circumstance. A broken chair was too complex to cope with except to toss into the yard and forget about. A damaged relationship was too complex except to vent rage and frustration at it.

  We turned onto my road, the road to Brassard’s farm. When we came to the top of the hill and the view opened, I almost wept with relief. But our comfortable fatigue had become a poisoned exhaustion.

  We talked that night, over the campfire, mainly about social issues, demographics, poverty, education. We were less comfortable together. Cat asked me if I wanted to talk about what had happened at Larson at the end—some catharsis—and I told her no. We hit the sack early. In the morning, we packed her up and walked down the hill together. She praised the beauty of the day and how tranquil it was, but the comment seemed rather rueful.

  Whatever fun we’d had, the Goslants had polluted the memory of it. I desperately wished that Cat could meet Earnest, wanting to show her a decent, solid, intelligent person, but still his truck was not there.

  We stowed her stuff in the car, hugged, kissed. Head against my shoulder, she said, “Honey, you know I love you. And I have no right to tell you how to live. But I think you’re making a mistake with this. I really think you’re doing the wrong thing this time. I’m sorry. It just seems … like, crazy to me.”

  She had quoted my words about Sandeep almost verbatim. But she wasn’t being ironic or cruel. She was trembling with apology, offering it with all the sincerity in the world.

  I hugged her harder. “I know. I know. Thank you.”

  “Just tell me you’re going to take care of yourself,” she said. “You don’t have to do this, you really don’t … Promise me you’ll think about that? Promise me.”

  I promised. And at that moment, I completely agreed with her. When she drove away, I felt her absence instantly, a hole in me. Loneliness, the little cringing kind, came rushing back into my days and nights. Between the emptiness after Cat, and the horrible poverty of the Goslants, I spent the next couple of days thinking through the logistics of my retreat.

  Chapter 9

  I can’t put it off any longer: I haven’t been revealing the full scope of the desperation that hurtled me off the tracks in Boston. I came to my land and to Brassard’s farm in more abject retreat and internal imbalance than I’ve been willing to admit.

  Back in Boston, I got into serious trouble for unprofessional conduct at Larson Middle School. I fucked up. I’m sure this was why I had a hard time finding a teaching job in Vermont.

  I made inappropriate physical contact with one of my students.

  This is the first time I have actually written those words, and they scream off the page in accusation.

  There’s context to what I did—and ultimately, the context is more important than the act. Context: I didn’t feel “pique” against Matt. I was damaged by our ending, and I was heartbroken, not just about losing him and losing the marriage I thought I’d been constructing pretty well, but about life and, in fact, about losing the idea of marriage itself. I won’t pollute this recounting with the sordid details of what Matt did or said, but life was more about loss and betrayal than I had ever imagined. It wasn’t just that Matt didn’t love me; it was more that nobody loved anybody. Grim.

  As I’ve said, back at Larson I was part of a group of teachers who had some progressive approaches to education. We encouraged the kids to be more expressive, more honest about their anger and frustration, about their family life.

  We knew that the biggest impediment to their future success wasn’t school, but the society they lived in, the families they lived in. Too many came from single-mom households. Too many had witnessed violence, divorce, drug use by parents or siblings, crimes committed on them by others. Some had committed crimes themselves and lived with whatever psychic residue that leaves. Some came to school hungry, and not just for food. They came starved for a reasonable degree of love and trust—the emotional security we generally assume should be built into kids’ homes.

  I’m not saying there weren’t kids who were happy, lived in complete families, and led wholesome, sufficient lives—there were. This was not a deeply troubled, crime-ridden, impoverished inner-city school district of the kind that’s so popular in all those redemptive, feel-good teacher movies. But as one eighth-grader told me, there were so many kids with “issues” that it was almost a social stigma not to have a few.

  We kept our antennae up for problems that might warrant intervention, and we maintained frequent contact with the guidance office and social services agencies. And when it seemed the bes
t course, we also put our own shoulders to the wheel.

  We knew that better teacher-student ratios equals better grades and fewer behavioral problems, and we knew that our school couldn’t afford more teachers. So we changed the numerators: More teacher hours per kid equals better everything. We spent a lot of time with our students, individually, often after class. We believed we could make a difference. And I’m sure we did.

  Larson was a big brick pile built around 1940, a central building three stories tall with two-story wings projecting into an asphalt playground. It occupied its own block in a residential neighborhood of three-story apartment buildings, some fairly well kept up and some getting rough around the edges.

  I loved that place. It had an agreeably worn quality, pleasingly rounded and sculpted by the river of young lives gently eroding its halls and classrooms over the decades. What it lacked in modern amenities, it made up for with an old-fashioned charm. In front, concrete entry columns flanked three sets of big double doors, capped by an arch with William J. Larson Middle School proudly carved into it. The wooden staircases creaked, and they were still framed with the kind of banisters that kids could slide down despite the age-old prohibitions against doing so. The building’s aura was that of an elderly, kindly aunt.

  Every classroom had high ceilings and tall windows along one side. Teacher’s desk up front beneath a big clock that ticked loudly, blackboard behind. The students’ desks were two-person Masonite-topped tables with separate chairs, circa 1990. Video setup on a rolling trolley. The computer lab in the library had some recent, decent equipment, but otherwise the old ambience was alive and well. It smelled of chalk dust, hair gel, adolescent body odor and deodorant, the stink of photocopy toner mingling with the whiff of sloppy joes from the cafeteria.

  As my colleagues did, I often stayed on after the school day to tutor, console, confront, or interrogate one kid or another.

  So there I was in that last year, and I’d been divorcing Matt for most of it, and here comes yet another kid: Omar, about fifteen, in eighth grade and with a life that was a disaster. I first asked him to stay after class to discuss a quiz on which he’d answered “Bite me” for every question.

  We met so I could explore the reason for the answers he’d given. I told him, “This says to me that either you don’t know—which I don’t get, because you and I both know you’re smart. Or it says you don’t care, when I know you’re actually interested in some of this material. Or it says you have contempt for school, or for me, but you seem to have an okay time here and I thought you and I got along pretty well. So what’s up?”

  After some digging, I learned that his father had recently gone “crazy” on drugs and gotten arrested and that his mother couldn’t stop crying. His older brother, seventeen, just took off and they didn’t know where he was, and his little sister had started sucking her thumb again, at the age of eleven.

  We were sitting in my big, bright room, door open to the hall, a few stragglers passing, voices bidding each other goodbye in the echoing hallway, and Omar broke into tears. I was facing him across his desk, right in front of him, and when he cracked I reflexively leaned over and hugged him awkwardly. His sobs pounded against my chest. It was so complex and so big that the only way to name or say it was to cry. A howl from the heart. My cheek was wet with his tears. This is no small matter: For a teenage boy, to cry is to surrender a lot of machismo, to admit that his swagger has been pretense.

  Then he said, “So now I’m fucking up school just like everything else is fucked up,” and that broke the rest of my heart. I told him that he wasn’t fucking up, he just needed to acknowledge the problems and come up with practical strategies to overcome them. Eventually, he calmed. When he left, I handed him the card of the head of guidance and pleaded with him to contact her and see if there was anything the school or social services could do to help. I also told him he could always talk to me if he needed to; I was in my room for at least half an hour after school on most days.

  Omar was tall for an eighth grader—he’d been held back. He had a faint mustache and a chubby, childish face with full, expressive lips over uneven teeth. During my months observing him, he struck me as a bit clumsy physically, in an endearing kind of way. But he was pretty good at maintaining the jivey persona required by his fellow students, and so he seemed to me, from my distance, to be reasonably popular. On the other hand, middle school is largely an education in the theater arts, immersive training in doing an impersonation of a peer-determined idea of “normal,” so his persona didn’t necessarily reflect his inner state.

  My home life was such a mess that I took refuge in my work, spending more and more time after school. I felt cruelly betrayed by Matt’s infidelities and his hurtfulness and his emotional indifference to figuring out how they affected our relationship. I had been cut by all the raw edges, both paper cuts and deep slashes, that go with the rancorous ambivalences of divorce, especially if it has dragged on too long and the wounds are reopened daily. Ironically, one of the most painful aspects of it all was realizing that he didn’t need me. I needed to be needed! Being needed allows you the opportunity to provide succor, to demonstrate love, to be the balance and the ballast. To prove you can be the strong one. It is a good thing to feel.

  You can see where this is going. Omar stayed after class again, cried, talked. We hugged. Et cetera. He was so grateful. I felt good about myself: the Samaritan teacher. After a few such meetings, he had stopped crying and our encounters became more reciprocal, less charged conversations. He showed himself to be more intelligent than I had first assumed, and I felt we were developing a special relationship, communicating on a level beneficial to both of us. I began to look forward to seeing him. I was confident that our talks had helped him, and in my divorce-battered condition I welcomed the pride that gave me. I was no doubt blind to other signals. We hugged, but only briefly, when he took his leave.

  But then one afternoon, I was leaning, half sitting against my desk, and he rather spontaneously came up to me and hugged me. God help me, this is how starved I was: I relished the feeling of a body pressed to mine, somebody goddamned well needing contact with me. He was a big kid, about as tall as Matt; all the parts and places fit the same. Neither of us made any suggestive movement, but yes, okay, yes, there was probably a bit more frontal contact than is appropriate for such hugs. And I let it go on for too long before I shrugged away.

  Was it erotic? For him, maybe. As for me, I don’t know what I thought or felt. I wasn’t sleeping at night and I was taking caffeine pills to get through my workday. In any case, I have never been good at distinguishing the precise dividing lines between companionship, the pleasant pressure of friendly touch, and erotic contact.

  I didn’t see Omar after class for a few days, and I had no reason to ask him to stay on—no bad test results or papers so wretched they required personal follow-up.

  But one day, he lingered after the others left. He seemed to be relapsing into another tough phase. He didn’t cry, but he spoke darkly and hopelessly. I made sympathetic noises. He came to the desk and we hugged and it went on too long and his hand drifted too low in back and cupped my buttock and I was slow to react, and that’s when I heard muffled snickering from the doorway and looked up to see a little crowd of boys and girls, leaning in to watch. Obviously, Omar had been talking up his adventures with the horny Ms. Turner, bragging about his cougar conquest, and had invited them to the show.

  It went through the whole student body overnight, manifested in suppressed smirks in class and, in the hall, a different kind of glance, followed by averted gazes.

  The administration heard about it. The principal, vice principle, and faculty council chair interviewed me. I told my version, skipping the part about my inner confusion. They believed that I had been moved only by compassion and that my oversight was due to an excessive expression of it. But it was a serious lapse. They had no recourse but to remove Omar
from my class and put me on a kind of probationary status. When the school year ended, budget cuts eliminated a couple of positions, and I was one of those whose contracts weren’t renewed.

  I couldn’t blame them. I had let my personal life interfere; my control had slipped. I looked like hell, with bags under my eyes, split ends, lost weight. I walked around in an exhausted haze from the emotional wear and tear, and by then I was preoccupied with the hellish logistics of the divorce endgame: doing the awful paperwork, sorting possessions, finding a new place to live. During that last term, my colleagues’ responses segued from sympathy to concern to professional disapproval, to a subtle ostracism as, one by one, they distanced themselves from the contaminated one. I lost some good friends because, when they tried to offer condolences or advice, I told them they could shove it up their condescending asses.

  As bad as my external circumstances were, the internal ramifications of the Omar event were worse. I had started to trust him, assumed that it was reciprocal. I had started to enjoy our afternoon chats and believed he did, too. And his betrayal, his exploitation of these simple faiths, echoed everything Matt had done. It reiterated the duplicity, cruelty, disrespect—the whole Dumpster of disappointments and disillusionments. It branded me with an unhappy outlook on life in general and my life in particular.

  That pathetic episode—not so much what I had done as what I’d felt—constituted a rude awakening. Was I really so desperate that I needed, and could take, affirmation from a fifteen-year-old boy? Was I really so lonely or hungry that I couldn’t resist the need for physical contact? When I felt his hand slip to my rump, my response should have been instantaneous, but what I really felt was a sort of helpless puzzlement about the sensation that seemed to deserve a couple of seconds to process.