Summer one. Altas’s first summer ever. The number one best season of the year. But mostly, in this case, first summer session. These short terms represent a flagrant disregard for natural laws, quantum mechanics, and the rules of physics that otherwise govern time. Cramming what normally takes fifteen weeks into five perhaps does not sound entirely outrageous, but it is, both in what it demands and in the compromises we all make to allow it to happen. I never teach Summer Two. I hate Summer Two. Summer One starts soon after spring semester ends, and it’s easy enough to keep going, especially since the drop-off in workload is significant. Summer Two, by contrast, means you get five weeks off, but then you have to work straight through till Christmas. Christmas.
When they made me teach Summer Two one year and I complained to Nico about the straight-through-till-Christmas part, he focused exclusively on the five weeks off. People who work nine to five with only ten days off all year tend to fixate on that part. This is unfair. One reason is that people with real jobs get weekends off, and I do not. There’s all that reading and writing and research to do. And then there’s the grading. Two sections of comp, twenty-five students each, five papers per student, five pages per paper, five minutes per page—even I can do the math, but I needn’t. Suffice it to say, it takes all weekend. Another reason only five weeks off till Christmas is unreasonable is that people with real jobs don’t really work nine to five. They take coffee breaks and cigarette breaks and water breaks and go out to lunch and have parties for coworkers and do team building activities such as everyone takes the afternoon off and does a ropes course. We do all that too (not the ropes course), but it doesn’t come out of work time; it comes out of sleep time because all the paper grading and lesson planning still has to get done. Nico’s other point was that it was only five weeks off one way or the other, so what did it matter if it came first or second. Two words: until Christmas.
Fifteen weeks into five is also the kind of math even I can do. What it amounts to is meeting for two hours every day, no days off, no time for slacking. It means that missing even one day puts students pretty much hopelessly behind even though it also means that they feel they can cut class more often because, jeez, it meets every day. It’s the same amount of class time as a real semester, but it’s only one third the amount of time for homework—one third the time for reading, for research, for writing papers, for completing class projects. One third the time for grading. So it’s a challenge. On the other hand, I love summer sessions. It’s nice to be able to concentrate on one thing instead of fifty. You get really close with the students. You feel like you get a lot done. But mostly, you get out of your house and away from your roommates (both teaching Summer Two) and their baby for the entire morning. If you hold an office hour, meet a friend for lunch, and then go running, you won’t see anyone until late afternoon.
There is also little as exhausting as summer session. It’s a good thing it’s so fast because you couldn’t keep that pace up for more than a few weeks. Sometimes, you have so much grading and planning and meeting with students to do that you barely have time for anything else. But as I say, it’s not just a quick session. Time bends. Abstract theories of physics come to apply. And so sometimes, summer sessions are strange and eventful despite all the time spent working. And during this one, simply, the whole world changed. Five weeks later, it was a different place, the old one but a memory trace, a whisper of an old life, so remote as to not even be my own.
I was teaching English 102—Intro to Lit. The first day is always the easiest. It’s when the students most resemble the ones you were fantasizing when you planned the course, when all they have to do is listen and smile, laugh in the appropriate places, and that’s enough. On the first day of class, since they’d not read anything yet for homework, I decided—Atlas-inspired—to read aloud to them. We did The Lorax. Good literature is good literature after all. We moved the chairs into a circle, and I showed them the pictures and everything. The students started off a little dubious, wondering if I thought they were in kindergarten or what. But soon enough, they settled into being read to, remembered how nice it is to be told a story, how when it’s one you’re familiar with you slip out of the narrative and into the cadence, the lull of the reader’s voice, the waiting with joyous anticipation to be told what you already know and understand more than is written. There’s a reason we read to our kids, and it’s not just because they can’t do it themselves. It’s because there’s a difference between reading yourself and being read to. I was tempted to give my new students a metaphor about sex versus masturbation but not on the first day of class. I sent them home with a dozen poems to read and explicate, beamed at the smiles of relief I saw leaving the room (“She seems nice” and “This won’t be so bad”), and went outside to bask in sunshine.
On the steps, I found Ethan doing the same. “What are you doing on the steps of my building?” I said, sitting down next to him.
“I didn’t realize it was yours,” he said.
I turned and looked at the sign above the door.
“It says ‘English Department,’ ” I pointed out.
“So it does,” Ethan admitted and shrugged. “Summer session. They’re redoing the history building for fall. Removing all the asbestos or something. Makes you feel really good about the last four years you’ve spent in there. In any case, they moved all our summer classes over here.”
“What are you teaching?”
“History 102. You?”
“English 102,” I answered happily, hugging my knees and grinning at him as if this were just an impossible coincidence. I love the first day of class.
“You’re teaching The Lorax?” he asked, seeing it in my hands.
“Just for the first day.”
“Sounds fun.”
“What did you do?”
“Gave a mini-lecture summarizing History 101 in case they forgot or didn’t take it.”
“What’s that take? About an hour?”
“Well, History 101 is roughly the dawn of recorded time to about 1499, but it’s only Western civilization, so it’s pretty doable.”
“Do they seem nice?” I asked.
“So far,” he said. “Yours?”
“Yeah, so far.” We sat quietly and shared the mixed high/relief of the first class, coming down off the adrenaline of nerves and into the calm you get before the first homework assignment comes in when you don’t yet know what you’re in for and have nothing so far to grade.
“Want to have lunch?” he asked finally.
“I’m about to go running today, but I could do it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow it is,” he said. Then, “Are you one of those people who likes to run alone? Because I’d love to run with you too. Not today of course”—he looked down at his khakis and tie—“but another day.”
“What about your ankle?”
“It was only a sprain. It’s healed. Maybe we can run slowly.”
“Sounds great,” I said. I don’t in fact always like running with other people. But in the glow of day one, I could deny him—or anyone—nothing.
“I ran into Ethan,” I reported when I got home. “We’re having lunch tomorrow if you want to join us. And we’re going running Wednesday.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you he’s teaching right upstairs from you,” Katie apologized.
“How was day one?” said Jill.
“Good. They seem nice. Smiley. Participated some.”
“How did they like The Lorax?” Jill asked but seemed distracted by Katie who herself seemed pretty distracted.
“They liked it. They got it. They had interesting ideas about . . .” I trailed off. “What’s with you two?” Jill couldn’t keep her eyes off Katie. Katie looked like she might explode.
“I met a boy,” she shrieked.
I looked at Jill who suppressed, not quite, a smirk then swallowed it. “She thinks this one is different.” She shrugged at me, bemused, eyebrows raised.
“His name is Peter. He just moved here from Utah for college. He’s only twenty-one, but it’s okay. He wants to major in zoology. He’s very cute and nice. He paints. He’s tall. He thinks I’m funny. He’s in charge of food for the youth picnic we’re hosting on Thursday, and since I’m in charge of games, we have to work together—”
“Why?” Jill interrupted.
“What do you mean?”
“Food and games have nothing to do with each other.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Katie. “These are five-year-olds. What do you think happens if you feed them ice cream and then do a sack race? What if he fed them macaroni salad and then I had them playing Marco Polo in the pool?”
“The horror,” agreed Jill.
“So when are you going out?” I asked.
“Oh, he hasn’t asked me out yet. But he will. I can tell. We’re meeting tomorrow morning to discuss the picnic.” And she danced upstairs to try on everything she owned followed by everything I owned and everything Jill owned.
On Tuesday, we tried to define the term “poem.” It was hard. My students knew it needn’t rhyme. They knew it didn’t need to sound pretty. But they didn’t know what it did need to do. At first they asserted that they knew one when they saw it, but I gave them some Robert Hass, and then they had no idea. It looks like prose. It sounds like prose. I assured them it was considered poetry and sent them home to write a response paper supporting that position or explaining why it was crap, whichever they liked.
Ethan and I carried lunch out of the sandwich place and sat under a tree on the quad and ate it. I told him about class, gave him a copy of Hass’s “A Story About the Body.”
“It’s prose. It’s totally prose,” he said, laughing. “That’s the wrong answer, isn’t it?”
“Officially? There is no wrong answer.”
“Actually?”
“Actually, it’s a poem. Stark, visual, lyrical, opaque. Robert Hass is a poet. What did you do?”
“We started religion in Renaissance Europe. At this stage, it’s mostly lecture, but it’s really exciting. Telling them what happened and why and what it led to, this long chain of interconnected events . . . What?” I was smirking.
“It’s make-believe,” I said. “Storytelling. Fun with narrative.”
“Oh, you’re one of those.” He rolled his eyes. “Why don’t English majors believe in history?”
“Because it’s all so much more complicated and suspect and full of half-truths and warped and incomplete than you’re telling them . . .”
“Warped?”
“And they’re just writing it down and memorizing it like it’s what really happened . . .”
“So do you,” I insisted. “We don’t have any kind of accurate picture of the history that was made, say, yesterday, so I know for sure that whoever spins it however many years from now is making it up.”
“But you’ll be dead then.”
“So there won’t be anyone to correct them.”
“You don’t teach history when you teach Shakespeare?” he asked. “You don’t tell them about the printing press and the new settlements in the Americas and the plague and the influx of people in London?”
“I do, but only to show them what we don’t know. Besides, that’s not history; that’s background information.”
“You’re drawing awfully fine distinctions there.”
“Anyway, those are facts we know are true. We aren’t making those things up.”
“Can I just reiterate that you teach fiction?”
“Just because fiction is made up, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. What do we learn about life from Shakespeare’s history? Maybe Shakespeare was Catholic, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he married willingly, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he loved his family, maybe he deserted them at the first opportunity. Maybe both. We know nothing from history. We learn what’s true from King Lear. Old age is frightening. It’s hard to recover from the feeling of betrayal even when you know you’re wrong. There are few things, even death, worse than madness, blindness, loss of power and respect and the love of your family. Storms in the world accompany storms of the soul. Both serve as powerful metaphors. Fiction is much more true than history. History is about other people. Fiction is about you.”
“You’re just using characters as models. So am I. It’s just what my characters did really happened. We learn from them the same way we learn from Lear. We try to honor what we admire and avoid what felled them. The particulars change but not the pattern, not the overriding—”
“Narrative?” I guessed.
“I admit nothing,” he said.
We sat and thought awhile, enjoyed the weather. Then we threw out the remains of lunch and set a place and time to run. As we were walking away from each other, I turned around. “Ethan, speaking of inevitable narratives, Katie met someone.”
“Oh, that’s great,” he said—because what else could he say?—but he may or may not have meant it. “Who is he?”
“His name is Peter. She met him at church.”
“What’s he like?”
“Haven’t met him yet. They have their first date tonight.” I’d had a text on my phone when I got out of class.
“Sounds pretty serious,” Ethan said. “See you tomorrow.” And I started home to find out just how serious it was.