As I walk, I go to neighborhoods I never go to any longer. I have ID cards from all the universities at which I’ve been an adjunct and, among them, I get into almost every museum in New York for free. I walk through shows in Chelsea, start reading Artforum. I look at massive canvases of black and white, all charcoal, bloodied heads and children hung from trees, close-up photographs of the ocean and the sky, small bits of vastness blown up, made big. I stand a long time in front of paintings I don’t wholly understand and try to let them work on me.
* * *
Kayla misses two days of school. I go to the office of the counselor with whom she’s close to find out if she knows where she’s been but I find out the counselor’s been transferred to a middle school. She was advocating for devoting more resources to kids with learning disabilities so she’s been sent to work under another, less opinionated counselor in an attempt to be retrained.
Are they replacing her? I ask the twenty-three-year-old who was hired to do data entry but is now sitting at the desk where the counselor met with a full caseload of students every day. There are so few places in the building where it’s quiet, and this data-entry person appears to have been the first to learn this space was free.
She says: Probably?
* * *
On the third day, I see on the live attendance tracker that Kayla’s at school and I go into the third-floor bathroom and see her shoes under the door of the extra-large handicap accessible stall and I knock and tell her that it’s me.
Where were you? I say.
My mom went on a trip with her new boyfriend.
Did you go with her?
It was supposed to be just for the weekend, so I was supposed to watch my brother, but then she didn’t get back until last night.
Kayla’s little brother is her favorite person, ten years younger; when she talks about him she stops fidgeting and sits up straight.
You guys were alone? I ask her.
I think probably this is something I should tell the counselor except she doesn’t work here anymore.
I’m grown enough, she says.
You cook? I say.
My boyfriend brought stuff, she says.
I think about the bruise she showed me and she sees me looking. It was fine, she says.
I look at her and shake my head and she smiles at me.
She says: You miss me?
* * *
Four of my friends come over. They suggested that we go to dinner, but I can’t afford to go to dinner, so I invited them to our house and my husband cooks.
We’ve all been friends for years; we met in grad school; none of them have children; we see each other much less often now. Most of them have money or have partners who make money. One bought a brownstone with her partner’s trust fund and spent a year doing it over; another took a year off of work to try to write a book, moving in with her corporate-lawyer boyfriend, spent three months with him abroad. When both my children were born these women were kind and generous in ways that continually shocked me. They brought us dinner, took our trash out. They sat with me in university offices as I pumped milk.
They don’t know about the bankruptcy. I worry already that I exhaust them. There is no fixing the place that we’re in, no saying something that might make it better, so I don’t tell them, and, often, when they ask me how I am, I just say I’m tired and get quiet.
One of my friends, the one who took the year off—who is lovely, younger than me, quadrilingual, who is planning a wedding and, when she talks about the wedding, turns away from me and addresses the other women in the room in a way that makes me think she doesn’t trust that I’d have much to say about dresses or floral arrangements or how she might do her hair—she brings an acquaintance of ours to this dinner, another woman who is very wealthy, whom our quadrilingual friend describes whenever she brings her up as elegant, just so elegant. She has some great job in which she works from home a couple hours a day and makes some absurd amount of money because she’s smarter than nearly every other person that she works with and they think the work she does should take all day.
This place sounds awful, says this woman I know least well of all the women, speaking of my job.
I nod, then shake my head, not sure what to say.
I keep looking at my friends, wondering if they feel equally annoyed by nearly everything this woman’s saying. She also has a baby, the only one besides me, except she has a full-time nanny. Except, she says, she sends her husband to their country cottage with the baby every weekend so that she can get a break.
You should leave, this woman says about my job. It sounds so awful.
She wears tight, high-waisted jeans and a tucked-in black T-shirt. She has a shock of white-blond hair and she’s lined her eyes on top.
I can’t leave, I say.
She thinks I mean because I can’t leave the students, which is not untrue, but mostly, I can’t leave because we wouldn’t be able to pay our rent.
This woman sighs this big, long sigh that I think is supposed to be a sort of compliment-slash-show-of-solidarity between us. I know that if I were to sit with her by ourselves and talk a long time I’d probably like her. My quadrilingual friend is kind and brilliant and exacting and I trust she likes this woman because she is too. But I don’t have the space to sit and talk with her, to listen to and try to like her, so I sit and I allow myself to hate her, because I’m tired and it’s easy. I look at my friends around the table and wonder what they’d do if I stood up and I hit her.
You’re a hero, she says.
No I’m not.
* * *
Why do you stay, though? asks the Chilean writer a day later; her questions I don’t mind because I’ve decided that I like her. It can’t be only the money.
I love them, I say. I can’t say it without feeling like some bullshit movie that’s supposed to make you feel good, some bullshit movie that perpetuates the narrative that black and brown kids need earnest white people to rescue them.
The Chilean writer smirks at me.
I’m good at it, I say.
The kids are smart and, maybe more importantly, they’re children. They’re teenagers, eager, malleable, and thoughtful. I get to ask them questions, talk to them, I get to make them think. It’s thrilling in all the minutes that it’s going well and I think maybe, every third or eighteenth minute, that they’re learning something. It’s thrilling when they listen, thrilling when they argue and they think. It’s thrilling, but also, I’m embarrassed by how much I love them, by how little it is they’re getting from me, how whatever I give them isn’t anywhere close to what they need. I hate every time that someone says how good it is, my teaching these kids, because I’m embarrassed that I thought it might be too at first. That after years of fighting to get to be a college teacher, I was still so often shocked by how little my students needed or even wanted what I had to give. That I came to this school partially because I thought helping would feel good, because I thought I had something to offer, here. That I should have known better, that intellectually, I did. That what my students do need—an obliteration of the same systems I grew up in, a burning down and re-creation of the spaces that I relied on all these years to keep me safe—I can’t do and don’t know how to.