The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
tête-à-têtes. They’re literary discussions.” If she wanted to get on her high horse, I figured, then I sure as hell could climb up on mine.
“I don’t consider the word I heard her use to be ‘literary.’ Nor do I appreciate your casual attitude about my standards. I’d like you to consider the fact that you’re a guest in my classroom.”
“So this is a turf thing?” I said.
“No, sir. This is an education thing. I work with children who are largely in the dark about the rules of acceptable social behavior. Now I may not be as well-versed in lit’rature as you are, but I can certainly guide them in decency.”
“Lady,” I said. “Loosen up.”
When I returned from the hallway, Velvet slipped me a note. “That rocked!” it said. “She’s a fucken bitch.” And that, more than the books, was our big breakthrough.
I began signing Velvet out of jail at lunchtime. We’d swing by the nurse’s office first, so that she could take her asthma medicine and pick up the bag lunch Maureen had started bringing in for her. Then we’d head down to the English wing.
I started letting Velvet borrow my books: Vonnegut, Kesey, Pirsig, Plath. One morning, I took my prize possession out of our bookcase, dropped it into a Ziploc bag, and brought it in to school.
“It’s a first edition,” I said. “And look. She signed it.”
Velvet ran her finger over Harper Lee’s signature. “Dude,” she said. “This is a fake.”
“No, it isn’t. I bought it from a reputable dealer. It’s authenticated.”
“Whatever that means, it probably don’t mean dick,” she said.
“Dude,” I said. “Watch your language.” She kept touching the signature, staring at it in disbelief.
Ivy popped in one day after school. “Looks like things are going well with Velvet,” she said. “I walked by at lunchtime today and you two were deep in conversation. I almost didn’t recognize her without the scowl.”
“Yeah, the glacier’s starting to melt a little,” I said. “She’s bright.”
Ivy smiled. “One suggestion, though, Red Sox. Keep your door open.”
“Because?”
“Because kids like Velvet can manipulate situations. And people. It’s one of the ways they learn how to survive.”
“Look,” I said. “I’ve been teaching for twenty years. I’ve seen plenty of kids play plenty of teachers, but I’ve never been one of them, okay? So unless you want to tell me how she’s manipulating me—”
“I’m not saying she is, Quirk. I think you’re doing a great job with her. All I’m suggesting is that you leave your door open.”
Our conversation left a bad taste in my mouth. Wasn’t she the one who’d set up this “faculty buddy” thing? Wasn’t she the one who’d gotten all revved up about the idea of Velvet trusting a male teacher? Now that the kid was moving in that direction, it was a problem? I did leave the door open for the next few sessions, and it was hallway racket and one interruption after another. “Hey, Mr. Quirk, you busy?” “Yo, Mr. Quirk, what’s happening?” So I started closing it again, and locking it. I suggested we sit at the back of the classroom where no one would bother us.
Writing-wise, I wanted to wean Velvet away from those comic-book plots she kept cooking up, so I bought her a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Velvet’s conclusion was that Lamott was “pretty wacked but pretty cool.” She reread the book, underlined her favorite parts, Post-it-noted pages. “No offense,” she said, “but too bad she’s not my teacher.” By the third week, her copy was held together with rubber bands, and Velvet had started writing about her life.
She steered clear of the really tough stuff—her parents, the foster home horrors—but what she wrote was still pretty compelling. She had this tough-vulnerable voice, you know? And an instinct about detail. She wrote this one piece about running away, and it was you getting into those cars that pulled over to the side of the road. It was you sitting in those Wal-Mart snack bars, waiting for folks to get up and walk away from their half-eaten food rather than tossing it. I don’t mean to overstate it. She wasn’t a genius or anything. But for better or worse, she’d lived more—suffered more—than most kids, so she had more to draw on. Reflect on. And she’d take feedback and run with it. Come back with a revision twice as good as her first draft. And damn if that wasn’t a rush.
One day, I asked Velvet to write about her favorite place. “My favorite place now or ever?” she asked.
“Ever,” I said.
The following Monday, she handed me an essay titled “Hope Cemetery.” I asked her where it was. “Near my grandmother’s house in Vermont,” she said. “I used to go there to think and shit. I couldn’t make it come out like I wanted. If you don’t like it, just rip it up.”
I’d been telling Velvet to grab the reader’s attention from the beginning, and “Hope Cemetery” sure accomplished that. It opened with her fitting a condom over some kid’s dick. During her second try at living in harmony with Grandma, Velvet had begun giving blow jobs behind a mausoleum at the back of the graveyard, ten bucks a pop. I stopped reading. Put the paper down and walked away from it. Was she starting to trust me too much? Was she playing Shock the Teacher?
But I sat back down and kept reading, and after the raunchy opening, “Hope Cemetery” took an unexpected turn. Became a meditation on Velvet’s grandfather, a stonecutter whom she knew only from his graveyard sculpture. (Later on, I Googled the guy. Three different hits verified that Angelo Colonni had been more artist than artisan, one of the best of the breed.) Velvet describes the change Hope Cemetery triggers in her. She stops doing business there and starts going, instead, to visit her grandfather’s art: floral bouquets, weeping angels, replicas of dead children, all of them released from blocks of granite. The essay ends back at her grandmother’s garage, where Velvet handles the chisels, mallets, and rasps that Colonni had used. In the last sentence, she slips one of her hands inside her grandfather’s battered leather work glove. And with that simple act, she feels a connection across time that’s both tactile and spiritual. It was a poignant piece of writing, better than she knew. I told her so.
She said she thought it kind of sucked.
“Well, it doesn’t,” I said. “Look, the Colorado Council of the Arts is sponsoring a writing contest for high school kids. The winners get cash awards. You should work on this some more and enter it. I think you’d have a shot.”
She snorted. Some snobby rich kid would win, she said; it would be a waste of time and stamps.
“Guess that lets you off the hook then,” I said. “Pretty convenient.”
“Should I take out the beginning?” she asked. “If I enter that contest, or whatever.”
I said I wasn’t sure. “It’s pretty raw. Might be off-putting to some straitlaced judge. But there’s a strange resonance between the beginning and the end. The glove thing, you know?”
“What’s resonance?”
“It’s like when something echoes something else and…deepens it. Makes it mean something more than it meant at first. See, there’s the initial effect of you putting the condom on the nameless boy, and it’s strictly business, right?”
“Those guys were douchebags,” she said.
“Yeah, well…but at the end, when you slip your hand into your granddad’s glove, it’s a loving act. So from the beginning of the essay to the end, you’ve changed, see? And it’s the sculpture that took you there. You get it?”
She nodded.
“So, to answer your question, it’s up to you whether or not