Emboldened by my success, I decide to give the same assignment to my students at The Art School. They are already working on mythic archetype collages for their Assemblage class. I tell them they can hand in photographs of their artwork if they use the same fairy tale in both (they’re always hocking me to give them extra credit for art projects). I show them a slide of Helen Chadwick’s Loop My Loop in which blond hair is intertwined with pig gut and a still from Disney’s Cinderella and invite them to consider the way fairy-tale images change meaning depending on who the teller is.
I read them a quote from the art critic John Berger that I underlined many years ago in my copy of Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde: “If you remember listening to stories as a child, you will remember the pleasure of hearing a story many times, and you will remember that while you were listening you became three people. There is an incredible fusion: you become the storyteller, the protagonist, and you remember yourself listening to the story . . .”
Natalie Baehr, a third-year jewelry design student whose blue hair is held up by Hello Kitty barrettes, points out that the ugly stepsisters in Disney’s Cinderella were a redhead and brunette in contrast to Cinderella’s Marilyn Monroe blonde. “Like how your mother changed the heroine in the selkie story from a blonde to a brunette, thus subverting the dominant cultural icon to foster self-esteem in her female offspring.”
Is that what my mother had been up to, I wonder, half hypnotized by the dangling plastic cats in Natalie’s hair, subverting the dominant cultural icon? I think about the way my mother would sit at her desk, abstracted, for hours, not writing, just looking out the window and watching the light change over the Hudson Valley.
“Or the selkie’s refusal to knit,” Gretchen Lu, a textile design major, says. “An obvious subversion of traditional gender roling.”
Gender roling? I imagine the way Gretchen might spell such a phrase and see myself circling it in red and writing word? in the margin. I wouldn’t subtract a point for it though. Not in this class. I’d have to at Grace because such a word would never get past the reading committee, but here at The Art School I allowed my students some liberty with the English language. They’re more visual than verbal, as they are fond of pointing out. Picta non verba would be the school’s motto if it had one.
The main thing is that my students are excited by the assignment. Gretchen wants to do “The Little Mermaid.” She already has an idea for an installation piece with torn fishnet stockings and dead fish (I can only hope she means plastic dead fish). Mark Silverstein, one of the Fashion Tekkies as they are somewhat disparagingly referred to, has an idea for a display window for “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: naked mannequins holding placards with the names of famous designers. I remind them there does need to be a written component to the assignment, and leave them chatting happily at the entrance to Dean & Deluca on University. I walk south and then, just as I’m passing in front of Washington Square Park, a light snow begins to fall. It’s not that unusual for it to snow the third week of March, but it feels like a sign of something. Of what, I’m not sure.
The next morning, taking the train north along the river, I see that the ice has melted from the edges of the river and the willows that line the water have taken on that yellow glow they get just before budding. As usual, by this time of the week, I am fresh out of ideas. I doubt that the dozen men in this morning’s class—inmates of the Rip Van Winkle Correctional Facility—will be as enthusiastic about fairy tales as were my students at The Art School. Even though the prison class is supposed to follow the same curriculum as the Grace class (so that work-release students can transfer easily from one to the other) I’ve had to whittle down my Rip Van Winkle syllabus to reading assignments that will (a) interest my students, and (b) not cause a riot. Although I’ve never caused a riot, the guards did have to intervene once in a scuffle that broke out over the question of whether or not Billy Budd was Captain Vere’s “girlfriend.” I’m not sure if I even want to use the phrase fairy tale in this particular class.
When the conductor calls the stop before the prison’s I’m halfway through my second cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and still more than half asleep because I stayed up late the night before with Jack. Maybe, I think, I could call them “bedtime stories” or “folktales.” I wonder if either term means something else in prison slang.
When I step off the train into a light drizzle blowing off the river I am still undecided. It’s only a short walk from the train station to the prison gates—which is one of the reasons I took this job when the dean at Grace asked if I would teach the prison extension class.
I also thought it might give me something to write about.
So far, though, there has been nothing in my students’ lives I feel equipped to write about. If anything, the weekly experience of teaching grammar and literature to these men has made me feel acutely the hubris of ever trying to even imagine any other person’s experience, let alone reproduce it in writing.
As I sign in at the main desk and wait for my escort I am dwelling not on what I’ll do in class today but on the depressing fact that the more I teach writing the less I seem able to write. I had once thought that teaching was a good backup field for a writer—that’s why I embarked on the Ph.D.—but now it’s just one more thing in my life that lingers incomplete.
The officer (not guard, I was told during hostage training orientation) arrives and hands me my picture ID, which I slip over my head. IRIS GREENFEDER, ADJUNCT LECTURER P/T, it says. Iris Greenfeder, ABD, it should say. Iris Greenfeder, all but . . . the story of my life, a series of all buts: all but published, all but a teacher, all but married. Lately it seems the buts are winning out over the alls. What all is left after so many diminishing buts? A bagel eaten down to its hole, my aunt Sophie would say.
The officer stops at the entrance to the courtyard to exchange a cryptic series of hand gestures with the officers in the towers. I look away, as if caught eavesdropping on a private conversation. The grass lawn, bisected by crisscrossing cement paths, slopes steeply down to the river, but the brick wall with its spiraling crown of concertina wire is just high enough to obscure all but the thinnest strip of river water. I’ve often wondered if the prison’s architect planned it that way, teasing the prisoners with that suggestive glimpse of freedom.
My escort has cleared our passage across the open space and we proceed, single file with him leading. The rain, which was a drizzle when I got off the train, is heavier now and I’d like to take my umbrella out of my book bag, but then, remembering the officers stationed in the towers and their proximity to automatic weaponry, think better of it.
My classroom is located in a low building abutting the prison wall. My students are there already. My escort waits until I take attendance and we learn that one of my students is in solitary and one has been paroled. When I’ve finished taking attendance, the officer leaves. It unnerved me when I first started teaching at Van Wink (as the inmates call it) that the officer left. I had expected when I accepted the job that there would be a guard present in the classroom at all times. Now what bothers me more is knowing the officer is standing just outside the open door within earshot of my lesson. The consciousness of that unseen listener comes to me at odd moments during the class.
As I shuffle papers from my bag the men in front of me shift from full slouch to a slightly more vertical posture. It’s less disrespect than the confinement of their desks that makes them assume this posture. The desks in the classroom are the old-fashioned, grade school kind. If my men sat upright their knees would ram into the underside of the kidney-shaped writing surface. Simon Smith is so big he can only sit in the desk sideways. I’ve asked the warden if we could have different seating but the desks are nailed to the floor. The only movable piece of furniture in the room is the lightweight plastic chair behind my desk (also screwed tight to the floor) where I’ve been warned to keep it whenever I dragged it around the desk so I could sit closer to my students. Now
I just sit on the edge of the desk instead.
Emilio Lara, my oldest student this term, asks if there’s anything he can pass out for me. He’s my courtly one, always offering some gracious gesture within the limits of his confinement. I think if it were allowed he’d carry my heavy book bag, he’d walk me across the courtyard, he’d open all the doors for me. And then keep on going through them. He claims to be “in” for counterfeiting, but I mistrust the romantic crimes these guys invent for me, while being charmed that they bother to come up with alternatives to the likelier murder, rape, and drug dealing.
Take Aidan, for instance. He says he’s here for gun smuggling for the IRA.
“Me too,” Simon Smith, my three-hundred-pounder from the South Bronx, said the first time Aidan volunteered this information. “Kiss me, I’m Irish.”
Today Aidan’s blue-green eyes skittishly avoid me. Is there a paper due that I’ve forgotten about? I don’t think so. I usually have these guys write in class. I figure they don’t have the most conducive environment for homework (although they do, out of all my students, have the most time on their hands). Something else must be up with Aidan. He’s got that kind of coloring—white skin, black hair, dark lashes fringing pale eyes—that my aunt Sophie called black Irish. (For years I thought she meant there were black people in Ireland.) Usually the effect is striking, but today his milk-white skin is so pale he looks as if he’s about to melt into the chipped and peeling plaster. Those heavy black lashes are drifting down. He’ll be asleep before we’re halfway through the next grammar lesson. So that’s what makes me decide. Later I’ll claim it was also because my only other choice for how to spend that rainy morning in prison was my lecture on the perils of dangling participles. But I know it was really because I wanted to wake up Aidan.
“Aidan,” I say, “have you ever heard the legend of the selkie girl?”
I’m gratified to see a little blood stir behind Aidan’s pallor.
“Silky girl?” Simon Smith asks. “Knew a dancer named Silky once.”
Emilio Lara makes a shushing sound and bares his teeth, revealing one gold tooth, but he says nothing. Courtliness has its limits and Simon is truly big.
“The selkie girl is an Irish legend,” I tell Simon, “a folktale. That’s what we’re going to do today.”
“You’re going to read us a fairy tale?” Simon asks.
There’s a general rustling of limbs in the classroom and the bumping of knees into wood. I think I even hear, from outside in the hall, an incredulous sigh. Now I’m in for it, I think, but then I see that the men are settling in, their attention more focused than I’ve seen it for weeks. Their bodies seem to lean forward and I think that if their desks weren’t screwed into the floor they would inch their chairs closer. And even though they can’t move, I get the feeling I’ve become the center point in a circle. They could be children waiting for a story. And then I realize. They are the perfect audience for my story.
Chapter Three
Ultimately, though, my students aren’t audience enough. By the time I board the train at Rip Van Winkle I am thinking that the piece might be possibly publishable. I carry this phrase back into the city, along with the rain that follows me down from the mountains, across the Tappan Zee and into the brackish tides at Inwood Park, down to the docks of Hoboken and Chelsea Piers: a cool infusion that will swell out of Manhattan harbor, past the Narrows and the beaches of Coney Island, and finally into the Atlantic Ocean.
Possibly publishable, I sing to myself for the next few days as it continues to rain. I go up to the main library at 42nd Street one evening at dusk to check to see which of the obscure literary magazines that have published my work in the past are still in print. Most are not, but I’m not discouraged. I walk back home through Bryant Park where the raindrops have spun crystal nets around the bare branches of the London plane trees. The streetlights on Eighth Avenue are reflected on the wet pavement. The sound of traffic is not so much muffled by the rain as transformed into something more liquid. Cars sluice through the inch or two of water pooling in the gutters. Horns sound far away, as if carried over a long stretch of water. Usually when it rains in the city you smell either the sea or the mountains. Tonight I seem to smell both. A heady mix of pine and salt, snowmelt and decay.
The raindrops on my umbrella ping out my new favorite song: possibly publishable. Henry James’s summer afternoon can eat grass; possibly publishable is the most beautiful phrase in the English language. It doesn’t matter if those other magazines have gone out of print; I know whom I’ll send it to: Phoebe Nix at Caffeine. When I met her at an open poetry night at the Cornelia Street Café a few weeks ago she told me she liked the poem I read. Have you thought about writing more about your mother? she asked. I shrugged and told her I hated that idea of relying on a parent’s fame—or in my mother’s case: once-fame-now-near-obscurity. I told her I’d spent most of my life trying to recover from my mother’s writing block. People usually laugh when I say that, but Phoebe had looked dead serious. Since she also looked about nineteen I attributed her reaction to a lack of maturity.
Later, when I was standing upstairs in the restaurant with Jack, she handed me her business card, which identified her as editor in chief of Caffeine—the new literary magazine I’d seen in bookstores and cafés around town.
“Do you know whose daughter she is?” Jack asked out on the street.
“No, is she somebody famous?”
“Vera Nix,” he said, a poet who was as famous for her suicide as her poetry.
“Shit,” I said and told Jack about the getting over my mother’s writing block comment.
“It’s like you have a radar,” Jack said, shaking his head, with something almost like admiration, “that picks up possible success and steers you the hell away from it.”
Still, I sent her some poems. From one writer’s daughter to another, even though mine hadn’t killed herself. Not exactly. She wrote me a nice note, declining the poems, but encouraging me to submit again.
I put Phoebe Nix’s note in my “submit again” box—my father’s old humidor, which I kept on my desk. Whenever I opened it the odor of Cuban cigars wafted out and for just a moment it was as if my father were in the room. Or had just left the room. It was how I’d find him in the hotel when I was little—by following the smell of his cigars from the lobby to the Grill, back into the kitchens, up the back staircase to the linen closets, to his office on the second floor. I had this fear that if I opened the box too often the smell of cigars would someday dissipate and so I opened it sparingly.
I thought of my “submit again” notes as having the same kind of expiration date. My experience—over twenty years of submitting to literary journals—told me that once I snagged a line of encouragement from an editor I had about three tries. If they didn’t take anything in three submissions they’d probably give up. The glow of promise would fade. My SASE would return with no encouraging scribble, merely a poorly Xeroxed rejection slip. Like a magic amulet given in a fairy tale, the notes possessed a finite power and must be used wisely.
By the time I reach the steps to my building I’ve resolved to cash in Phoebe Nix’s note—I can almost smell Cuban tobacco on the damp wind blowing east from the river. I close my eyes, one hand on the wrought-iron railing as I climb the steep steps, to concentrate on that scent and trip over someone sitting on the top step. I draw back, expecting one of the neighborhood street people sheltering from the rain, but then relax when I realize it’s someone I know. My relief quickly fades when I realize where I know him from. It’s Aidan Barry.
“I didn’t mean to scare you, Professor Greenfeder,” he says, rising to his feet. “I wanted to give you this.”
He’s holding something wrapped in a blue-and-white Blockbuster Video bag. It doesn’t look like a gun, but I back away from him and nearly trip backward down the steps. He reaches forward quickly and catches my arm to keep me from falling and I gasp. I look up and down the street to see if anyone is out,
but even in clear weather my corner of Jane, right next to the West Side Highway and the river, is not well populated. Now in the rain, there are only the headlights of cars on the highway. It’s Friday. Not one of Jack’s nights to come over.
Aidan drops his hand from my arm, looks down and shakes his head. I notice that drops of water glisten in his dark hair. “I guess I shouldn’t have come over here, but I was working on Varick Street and I saw from your address on that story you gave us that you lived close . . .”
“What do you mean working on Varick Street? Aren’t you . . . I mean aren’t you . . . in prison?”
Aidan laughs. “I was put on work release last month, Prof. I’m up for parole. I’m supposed to transfer into your class at Grace next week. I thought they told you that stuff.”
I shake my head. I bet they tell tenured faculty at Grace when their prisoner-students are released. Or maybe the tenured faculty never teach the prison classes. “Did you say you saw my address on the essay I gave you?”
He draws a sheaf of folded paper from the Blockbuster bag and hands me the Xeroxed copy of “The Selkie’s Daughter” I gave my classes. In the upper-left-hand corner is my address, phone number, and e-mail: my standard form for magazine submissions. I hadn’t even noticed I’d left it on the first page when I copied the piece for my classes. I’ve given my home address to all my students, including a dozen inmates of the Rip Van Winkle Correctional Facility.
“Shit,” I say, shaking the paper at Aidan. “Tell me my phone number isn’t scrawled on the men’s bathroom at Van Wink.”
Aidan smiles and shakes his head. Drops of water roll from his hair and dampen the collar of his denim jacket. A drop hits me and rolls down the back of my neck making me shiver. “Hey, don’t worry,” he says, “Emilio noticed you’d left your address on the essays and we asked the guard for some Wite-Out. The guys in that class like you. They won’t give your address out or anything. I guess I shouldn’t have kept it—just, that story you read about your mother reminded me of this book of fairy tales I had growing up and I thought I’d try to find it so I could write my essay on it.” Aidan is still holding out the blue-and-white plastic bag. I take it from him and look inside the bag. There’s a book and another sheaf of folded paper.