I HAVE A CRUSH on the mother of my worst student.
I suppose crush is a funny word for someone my age, fifty. And it’s an odd word to describe a person I’ve only just met—but it’s strangely appropriate. I feel like a teenager, goony and shy, crushed by this person who suddenly appears in my classroom doorway to talk about why her son is failing seventh grade science.
It turns out I have seen this particular woman in the parking lot of our school, six or seven times, waiting for her child to finish a sport or some other after-school program. Before today I didn’t know who she was or which child she was attached to; she was just a striking face sitting in a white SUV, all drastic cheekbones and dark eyes, and I confess to a double-take or two in response to her sharp profile as I made my way from the school building to my own car.
Now, in person, I must say: Abigail Cullen is ethereal. She floats through the door in a long white skirt and a dark blue top that reminds me of the upper atmosphere, where the stratosphere meets the mesosphere.
Hey, I’m a science teacher, not a poet.
“Hello, you must be Jacob’s mom,” I say, and I close my laptop and push back my chair. I rise and gesture toward my humble kingdom. “Please, come in.”
I HAVE TAUGHT middle school science for twenty-six years. I always planned to sharpen my focus and eventually get a PhD in some narrower field, become a professor. But by the time I finished my bachelor’s degree, I was buried in debt. So I took enough education classes to get a master’s, got certified, and then this job came open in my hometown and I applied, got it, and half a life later, here I still am.
This is not a major disappointment. Turns out I enjoy teaching adolescents. It is the closest we have as humans to a metamorphic or larval stage. I find the average twelve-year-old’s awkwardness surprisingly endearing. And not entirely unfamiliar. In fact, I get a visceral reminder of it every year on the first day of school, when I rise in front of them and feel a version of low-level social terror more fitting to their developmental stage than mine, when my own internal monologue (Does this shirt match my pants? Was that a stupid thing to say? Do I have a booger in my nose?) seems unchanged from when I was in their unlaced tennis shoes.
My older sister, who is the marketing vice president for a regional bank, calls my job “teaching cats to fetch.” And she’s not wrong. It can feel that way at times—the utter disinterest coming from all of those Brendans and Britneys. I will finish a section on igneous rocks (going so far as to bring in a hunk of local basalt) and I will think to myself, Hey, not bad, Edward, not a bad lesson at all.
Then I will look up to meet twenty-five dull-eyed, comatose stares.
But it is this very unlikelihood of success, long odds that they are, which can make the rare victories feel so special, the warm feeling I get every once in a while when a student lights up over a lesson on tectonic plates, or a fourth-chair clarinetist raises her hand and says, “Like music?” during our section on the properties of waves. “Yes, Morgan,” I will say with a smile. “Exactly like music.”
It is then that I remember why I do this job, when I think: Maybe I have awakened a soul.
“I’M JACOB’S MOM,” says Abigail Cullen. Her arms are so tan. “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Mr. Wells.”
“Of course,” I say. “Jacob is . . .”
Jacob is what? Difficult? Challenging? Loony tunes? I draw a blank staring at his mother’s face. I really should have had a word at the ready to describe Jacob before she came in. Instead, I stare at her, the juvenile voice in my head grilling me: Do my pants match my shirt? Do I have a booger in my nose?
“Right.” Mrs. Cullen smiles and looks down after my silence. “I suppose that’s why I’m here.”
I THINK I was destined to teach science. I was born July 20, 1969, the day men first walked on the moon. While my father sat watching news reports of the lunar landing on the waiting room television, a surgeon delivered me from my dying mother, who had a blood clot in her lung. After that, my dad raised my sister and me alone. I came into this world as my mother left it, as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the chalky surface of a new world and said, “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”
Armstrong later claimed that what he actually said was: “. . . one small step for a man . . .” This upset some people because that article a seemed to diminish what was a vast human endeavor. But I always believed that a man made more sense. If Armstrong had meant man in the broader sense, he would’ve in essence been saying, That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for . . . mankind.
Few people remember what was said by the second man to walk on the moon, my hero, Buzz Aldrin.
“Beautiful view,” said Buzz.
To which Armstrong replied, “Isn’t that something? Magnificent sight out here.”
Then Buzz uttered the two words which still give me goose bumps, expressing the paradoxical nature of what it is to grasp humankind’s miraculous and unlikely existence on a life-giving rock in the exurbs of a cold, hard universe.
“Magnificent desolation.”
“WE DON’T BELIEVE in that,” Jacob Cullen said the first week of class. He was explaining why he couldn’t do the assignment on plant life cycles. (It was nothing controversial: photosynthesis, vascular vs. nonvascular structure, that sort of thing.)
“You don’t believe in plants?” I said.
“Sex,” Jacob said. He was a slight twelve-year-old with intelligent eyes and a constant smirk. From what I gathered, he had recently moved to our school and hadn’t made friends yet. I was predisposed to like him, the way I tend to like any kid who doesn’t quite fit in.
“You . . . don’t believe in sex?” I asked.
“You’re not allowed to teach it to me.”
“I am most assuredly not teaching you about sex, Jacob.”
“You said sperm.”
I explained that the lesson was about angiosperms and gymnosperms, plants that reproduce using flowers and fruit versus plants that use cones.
“We don’t believe in that,” Jacob said. “God made the plants.”
This became a pattern. Whatever I taught—cell structure, heredity, geology—Jacob Cullen would approach my desk after class. “We don’t believe in that.”
“You don’t believe in rocks?”
“You said some rocks are four billion years old. How is that possible when the Earth is only six thousand years old.”
My unit on the moon and tides was the last straw.
I looked up to see Jacob at my desk. “What don’t you believe in now, Jacob? The moon? Tides?”
“God hung the moon,” Jacob said. “And the moon landing was faked.”
This is when I had finally had enough. That night I emailed Jacob’s parents.
AND NOW? WELL, whatever clever intercession I had planned on behalf of science has fled my addled mind. I can’t stop staring at Abigail Cullen, her jet-black hair tied back tight against that smooth, elegant forehead.
“Please, have a seat,” I say, and my hands shake as I gesture to a student’s desk. “Is Mr. Cullen coming?”
“Jacob’s dad is playing golf,” she says. Then she clears her throat. “We recently got divorced.”
“Ah. I’m sorry,” I say, then blurt out, “Me, too. Divorced, I mean. Not golfing. Clearly.” I indicate the room around us, which another sweep of my hand is meant to reveal is obviously not a golf course but a seventh grade classroom. So suave, so clever. Sweat breaks on my forehead. What’s the matter with me?
I might also have corrected that recently when mentioning my own divorce. Anya left eight years ago. I have not attempted to date anyone since. I meant to. But human beings like me, it turns out, are as subject to Newton’s First Law of Motion—that a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts upon it—as is anything else. And it’s surprising how few outside forces are lining up to act upon a fifty-year-old middle school science teacher.
Re: my divorce, another saying pops into my head, It feels like yesterday, which conveys nicely how the memory of a distant event somehow is sharper than one might expect given the passage of time. But I would argue that Anya’s leaving is not like that for me. The particular day my wife left feels exactly like it was eight years ago. In that I can’t really remember it with any real clarity. I know we talked, the last of a conversation we’d been having for a month. I remember being surprised that she was all packed. But I can’t conjure a single image of her car leaving, or the weather, or what either of us was wearing. It is the days and weeks and years preceding her departure which feel like yesterday to me, close enough to touch, to breathe. I walk into the living room after work and I am stunned to not feel her there, to not see her curled up on the couch, legs folded beneath her, a cup of tea on the table. I open the garage door and wonder where her car went. I slide the closet door open and fully expect to see her coats and blouses, her work slacks draped neatly over plastic hangers.
Why did Anya leave? Some problems don’t have easy answers. We didn’t fight. We liked going on hikes together and playing cribbage and trying new restaurants. I believe we were fairly well-suited. There were things she said before she left, about wanting to find herself and about passion and about the brevity of life, but I always felt like the things she didn’t say were equally as important. Our inability to have children. The death of her mother back in Minsk. And a quality in me that Anya called “your distance,” a description—and one that I cannot argue—suggesting that I could be emotionally unreachable at times.
I wish I could argue that, but in truth I have always had difficulty expressing emotion. The more intense the feeling, the harder it has always been for me to talk about, i.e., growing up without a mother, or my father’s alcohol-fueled dementia. I’m certain that I do repress things, as Anya said, but as I responded to her: I certainly don’t do it consciously. Or intentionally. What can you do when someone’s complaint about you is so elemental? That you are too tall. That your eyes are too blue.
My sister is just as stoic in her bearing. We are not criers or huggers. When I told her that Anya had left, my sister considered what I’d said for a moment and then asked, “Will you be selling the house, Edward? I know a good agent.”
I have always been Edward. As a baby, Edward, as a six-year-old, Edward, as a college freshman, Edward, as a teacher, Edward. Only Anya ever called me Eddie. From our first date—outdoor symphony concert with fireworks—after which I walked Anya home and she kissed me, she teased me about how many dates it might have taken for Eddie to kiss Anya. Twenty? Forty? I put the over/under at six.
“Goodbye, Eddie,” she said that first day, after she kissed me. She said the exact same thing nine years later, when, without the kiss, she left for good. “Goodbye, Eddie.”
Maybe this is why, in my classroom now, after my inane chatter about golf and divorce, I stick out my hand and officially introduce myself to Abigail Cullen this way: “I’m Eddie Wells. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Abigail Cullen,” she says. And a jolt of electricity goes through my arm as our hands touch. Seriously, what is this? A kind of temporary insanity? Some latent adolescent hormone stored up in my body somewhere? She’s just a human being, her hand just a hand, her skin just skin. Why is my face flushed? Why is my palm suddenly damp with sweat as I gesture toward a seventh grader’s desk.
And why does my voice crack when I ask her, “Can I get you something?”
Abigail Cullen looks around. “Like . . . what?”
This is a fair question. We are in a science classroom, not a martini lounge. I honestly do not know what’s the matter with me. I reach for a chemistry beaker. “Liquid volcano?”
EVERY TEACHER FINDS it necessary to deal with fundamentalists from time to time. Especially science teachers. I have had parents request that I teach intelligent design or creationism alongside what they call the “theory of evolution.” Other parents get agitated if I go anywhere near reproduction. But try teaching biology without the concept of procreation. You simply can’t. Our seventh grade curriculum, because it is so general, is about as inoffensive as you can get, but that doesn’t stop some parents from being suspicious of my motives, as if I’m trying to indoctrinate their children with, I don’t know, socialism, or paganism, or pornography.
I try to be patient, but to be honest, sometimes it gets to me.
If a parent brings up such concerns during conferences, I have a respectful speech I give about science and religion. I think having people see you as a human is key to these engagements, so I always talk about being a shy kid myself when I was their child’s age, how science was my favorite subject, how I was born the day men landed on the moon. Then I tell them an anecdote about my hero. “Do you know the first thing Buzz Aldrin did when he landed on the moon in 1969? He took communion. You see, he believed science and religion complemented one another, because both seek to understand the great mysteries of existence—one through hypothesis and experimentation, the other through parable and metaphor.”
It usually softens the parents but every once in a while this strategy backfires and makes everything worse. “The Bible is not metaphor,” an angry father said to me once. “It is the absolute word of God.”
I smiled. “But you have to admit, even Jesus spoke in parables.”
“Jesus spoke in truth,” the man said. “And as far as I’m concerned, you and your science class are part of Satan’s PR department.”
How do you respond to that?
This may be another reason why Buzz Aldrin is my hero. He spent much of his life being harassed by conspiracy theorists. In 2002, one of them was haranguing him outside a hotel, insisting the moon landing was faked, and that Buzz should confess to it. Several times, Buzz asked the man to leave him alone. He turned away repeatedly, but the man kept hounding him, yelling at his back, “Liar! Coward!”
I have watched the video of what happens next maybe a dozen times: the seventy-two-year-old former astronaut keeps turning his back on the man until finally he can’t take it anymore. He stops, faces him, and throws a compact punch into the lunatic’s jaw. This is the moment Buzz Aldrin became the hero of science teachers everywhere, the patron saint of Not-taking-any-more-of-this-bullshit.
“LET ME START by saying that I am not trying to demean anyone’s faith,” I tell Mrs. Cullen. “What I’d like Jacob to learn is the difference between belief and knowledge.”
But I am lost in her eyes. I clear my throat. “For instance, you could choose to not believe in gravity, but it won’t change what happens when you step off a curb, right? It is the same with evolution. Or climate change. These are not opinions to be retweeted or given thumbs-up, but complex series of processes that have been widely observed and studied, proven over decades and centuries through scientific method—whether a certain church or politician agrees with them or not.”
She cocks her head as if she’s not quite following. I think of giving her the Buzz Aldrin speech, but instead, I try another tack.
“That’s why I don’t believe it’s wise, or fair, to limit a child to the knowledge that was available two thousand years ago,” I say, “just as it wouldn’t be right if Jacob got an infection to give him frankincense because that was the only medicine available in biblical times. Does that make sense?”
That’s when I see the Cullen smirk on Jacob’s mother’s face. “Frankincense,” she says.
And this is when all hope drains from my body.
This is no longer simply about a boy and his religious parents.
This is about what’s wrong with our whole fractured and digitized country, the divisions created by people who cherry-pick facts, or who ignore them altogether, who choose for their reality paranoid videos fed by social media algorithms, the cynical tools of the greedy and lazy, the willfully ignorant.
And what I do next is unlike me.
I plead. “Ms. Cullen,” I say, leaning forward. “Abigail. I’m sorry to be so familiar, but if two intelligent people like us can’t get past these medieval fears and superstitions, past centuries of bigotry and backward thinking, what chance does humanity really have? I mean, with the serious threats that we all face—real, existential threats—we can’t be wasting our time arguing over whether God made plants, or whether the moon landing was real!”
At this, Abigail Cullen bursts into laughter. “Did he say the moon landing wasn’t real? Mr. Wells, I think my son is having some fun at your expense. We are not religious. At all. Jacob hasn’t been to church since he was baptized. He is, however, about to get crucified.” She smiles. “Metaphorically, I mean.”
APPARENTLY, JACOB HAS told his parents that he is failing science because his teacher is a well-known drunk. Mr. Wells forgets to assign readings and doesn’t grade tests. He sits at his desk, often asleep, or hungover. He doesn’t allow people to ask questions and will not see students after school. He assigns readings and gives tests that don’t even correspond to the homework. He leaves early every day to go to the bar. Because of his problems, in fact, everyone in class is failing.
“Everyone?” I ask. “Well, that’s quite a curve.”
“Oh yes. It’s an open secret,” Mrs. Cullen says. “No one says anything about it, though.”
“And why is that?”
Mrs. Cullen leans in herself, as if confiding a juicy bit of gossip. “Apparently, Mr. Wells was in a terrible accident last year.”
“An accident!” I almost admire Jacob’s creativity. I hope he’s doing better in English than in science.
“Oh yes. His wife and children were killed,” she says. “So. He drinks to forget.”
“Sure. Can I ask, How many children?”
“Two.”
“Ah yes,” I say. “The twins. Hope and Reason.”
She laughs and shakes her head. “I am sorry, Mr. Wells. Since the divorce, and the move, he’s been acting out like this. I found out earlier that he told his P.E. teacher that he can’t play floor hockey because he has lupus.”
“In his defense, it is floor hockey.”
We are still laughing when Mr. Cullen comes in.
“What’s so funny?” he asks. He is tall and balding, thick like a former football player. He is still wearing his golf clothes. His face is flushed and I suspect he has been drinking, working up his anger, which is likely made worse by seeing me laughing with his ex-wife.
He strides across the classroom toward me. “I don’t care what happened to you,” he says, “you have no right to take it out on these kids.”
“Mike, calm down—” Mrs. Cullen rises.
“I’m not gonna calm down!” He is coming around my desk.
I rise, too, hands in front of me in a peaceful gesture. “It seems there’s been a misunderstanding.”
“Mike,” Mrs. Cullen says. “Jacob is pretending to be some kind of fundamentalist. He says he doesn’t believe in science. He told his teacher the moon landing was faked.”
Mike Cullen looks confused. He is standing right next to me. “So what.” He smells like beer. “The moon landing was fake,” he says. “I saw a video on it. They couldn’t have flown through the Van Allen radiation belt without getting—”
I don’t even remember throwing the punch.
AFTERWARD, ABIGAIL INSISTS on driving me to the emergency room, even though I could easily drive myself. The injury looks worse than it is—a broken zygomatic arch, the narrow piece of cheekbone between the jaw and the ear. It will be a quick fix, maxillofacial surgery, like popping the dent out of an old car.
The whole thing sobers Mr. Cullen up rather quickly. I could be fired, of course, if my principal found out I took a swing at a parent, but luckily, my weak blow missed, and Mr. Cullen feels so badly for the damage his resulting counterpunch caused that he agrees not to file a complaint against me.
“Thank you,” I say. “I honestly don’t know what got into me.”
“I really am sorry,” Mr. Cullen says as I press paper towels against my bleeding nose.
“No, it’s my fault,” I say. “I can’t believe I lost it like that.”
“I can,” says Abigail, shooting a look at her ex-husband.
But before we leave for the hospital, I feel compelled to tell Mr. Cullen one thing. “Listen,” I say. “While it’s true that lengthy exposure to the Van Allen belt could theoretically cause a human being to suffer health issues, simply flying through on a spaceship is harmless and would expose you to roughly the same amount of radiation as an X-ray—like the one I’m about to get.”
He stares at me for a long time. “Okay,” he says finally.
“I’m so humiliated,” I tell Abigail on the drive to the hospital. “I go fifty years without taking a swing at anyone and then I lose it over the Van Allen radiation belt?”
She smiles. “It’s okay. Mike can be an ass. And he was drunk. I kind of wish you had better aim.”
I promise her I will train harder for my next defense of the scientific method.
Later, with a bottle of pain pills in my pocket and my surgery scheduled for later in the week, Abigail drives me back to the school. We have a nice talk on the drive, about kids and science and the pain of divorce. Ask her out, my internal voice says. Of course, this is the same hormonal voice that had me trying to punch someone two hours earlier, so the adult voice, the careful voice, reminds me that asking out a parent would be as inappropriate as the near-punch I almost landed.
I put the over/under on me asking out Abigail Cullen at not happening.
But then, sitting in the parking lot, in the leather passenger seat of her white SUV, I find myself thinking about Buzz again. About Anya and about passion and about the brevity of life.
“Abigail,” I say, “I hope this isn’t inappropriate, but I wonder, would you like to have lunch with me tomorrow?”
She looks at me, then at the school. “In there?”
Ah, right. How stupid of me. It is Thursday. A school night. “Right,” I say. “Yes, tomorrow, I will be eating lunch in the teachers’ lounge. I guess the weekend would make more sense for such a thing.”
She smiles kindly. And whatever teenage hormones I’m feeling are immediately familiar with this particular smile. The gentle letdown. She explains that her divorce is still fresh, that she is trying to break a pattern of “fixing one problem with another,” and that, right now, her kids need her attention. “I’m not really ready for anything . . .”
She doesn’t say the word, but we both know it: romantic.
But then she surprises me by reaching over and taking my hand. “But it’s so nice that you asked. Thank you. And actually, I could use a friend. Maybe we could, I don’t know, go on a walk sometime.”
“As it turns out,” I say, “I am an accomplished walker.”
After my surgery we agree to meet at the botanical garden at Manito Park. The sting of I could use a friend has largely worn off and I am very glad to be out walking with her. I am the one who suggests she bring Jacob, so that he can do an extra credit assignment on plant reproduction. Abigail tells me I look good, that the swelling has gone down, that I look like myself again. I explain how I brought my X-rays to class and how it turned out to be one of those rare expansive teaching moments; looking at pictures of my skull, a few of the students making the cognitive leap that they, too, were a collection of bones that a scientist might one day study.
Abigail tells me another good thing has come out of our meeting: her ex-husband has agreed to see a therapist about his temper. She’s glad for the kids, she says, especially Jacob.
As if on cue, he yells, “Angiosperm?” I look down to where he is examining the bursting crimson leaf of a Japanese maple. “That’s right, Jacob,” I say. “Very good.” His mother and I are standing above him, on a wooden footbridge, life everywhere around us in the dappled sunlight.
“Magnificent,” I say, “isn’t it?”