Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

It was my first day of school, and taking me there was the only social outing she had had in months. She treated it with all the pomp and circumstance that other women bring to more significant affairs — a dinner party here, a first date there — since while she had had these things in the past, they belonged to a different Mariam, one utterly unrecognizable from the one who stood in front of a mirror worrying about whether her neckline revealed too much for an early Monday morning.

We walked the six blocks to my school together, hand in hand, and I remember thinking, or maybe I’m just saying this now because there are few children in the world who do not want to remember their mothers as being beautiful beyond imagination, that there could be nothing better in the world than this. I had never seen my mother smile or walk that way before. She literally seemed to glow as she walked down the street, heels clicking and the inverted curls of her hair bouncing in sync, her beauty rising out of her in cone-shaped beams that I’m sure would have had the power to pierce any heart they touched. It was the most memorable walk I’ve ever had.

It wasn’t until we arrived at the school that her mood changed. It was almost possible at that moment to breathe in the confusion and anxiety that came with her seeing herself surrounded by women as young as or younger than she was, but without the bruises and uncertainty of language she carried. Those women wore jeans and shirts with logos advertising baseball teams and hardware stores, their hair unkempt, their lips naked. They walked their kids to the top of the steps and shook hands with the teacher and then banded together in circles that seemed almost preordained, as if their gatherings were reflections of a natural law that grouped women together by the size of their bodies and the color of their hair and the year and model of the cars they drove.

She left me just a few feet away from the school, kneeling down on the curb behind a rusted red van so she could hide in its shadow and see me clearly as she told me the first in a series of lessons that she later referred to simply as Things You Must Never Forget. She told me dozens of such lessons throughout my childhood, each delivered with the same insistent wide-eyed stare and stern voice that seemed to say on every occasion, you will never hear anything as important as this again, even if the point she had to make concerned utterly trivial matters: the proper way to break a clove of garlic; the necessity of keeping your socks dry. That first lesson went like this:

Jonas, I want you to remember what I say now. Are you listening? You must listen. This is important. There are things that you must not ever tell anyone. Is that correct? Must not? It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. You know what I mean. You are good. Say that after me.

Good.

No. Say, I am good.

I am good.

Yes, you are. And so you will listen. If someone asks you what’s wrong, you say nothing. Say this, Nothing is wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

Good. Say it again.

Nothing is wrong.

Perfect.

She kissed me once on both cheeks before safely crossing the street, where a row of identical two-story brick houses with small front porches and unguarded front lawns stood ready to hide her. With a few quick flutters of her hands, the kind generally used to shoo away dogs, pigeons, and the empty-handed poor, she waved me up the school’s steps, where I stopped and stared until she disappeared around the corner, because she knew that I would never leave until she was gone. A piece of dark blue fabric from the end of her dress trailed her for a fraction of a second and remained fluttering in space even after she had rounded the bend. It could have just as easily been a patch of blue stolen from the sky and delivered to earth for all the consideration I put into it. Imagined or not, that last patch of blue stayed floating in the air, and I could still see it even after she was gone just as clearly as I could see the stop sign on the corner and the maple tree that shaded the sign and intersection. That patch of blue was no less real for not having technically been there, just as my mother was no less real for being out of sight. We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.

It took the firm grasp of a teacher to pull me into the school, the bells having made their last call.

I said earlier that I couldn’t remember what happened to my mother the night before she took me to school, and perhaps that is true. Perhaps I can’t remember, neither then nor now. At the time I did know, however, that it was easy for terrible things to happen to women when they were out of sight. They took hard hits, and then later slept in your bed where you could protect them.

As Angela and I began to withdraw from each other, I found myself increasingly taken with my teaching; each new class was an opportunity to step farther away from what I thought of as my slightly bruised and sequestered self. Even if it was only for an hour and a half, after my first year at the academy was over, I knew that it was important to seize every chance to do so. I gradually began to transform myself from a quiet, seemingly sullen teacher, known primarily for my expensive black leather briefcase and the brown-bag lunches I carried to work, to a fully engaged and often dynamic lecturer who sometimes filled in his daily lessons with small digressions and slightly fanciful tales.

From the beginning I loved my job at the academy, but at that point it wasn’t because I was attached to teaching or to my students, to the late-nineteenth-century classroom with the stained-glass windows I taught in or to any of my colleagues, who were generally at least a decade older than I was and looked at me as a curious but nonetheless interesting intruder. I wouldn’t form any deep attachments to my students or to the building until much later, until I was certain that I was leaving. Only then would I recognize them. What made me happiest when I began were the simple tools of my trade: my chalkboard, my attendance notebook, my grade book, and the top drawer in my desk that came stocked with a month’s supply of pens, chalk, staples, paper clips, white-out, tape, and glue.

There was more to it than just this, however. Shortly after I began teaching at the academy, I began to think of English as my subject and then my discipline in a way I had never done before, not even in college when I stayed up late writing essays on Robert Browning and the emphasis on light in Hart Crane’s poems. Having grown up in the shadows of my parents’ high-pitched accents and broken grammar, I had always hesitated before I spoke and often whispered my words in case they failed to properly impress whatever audience was before me. What I didn’t understand until I began teaching was that knowledge, or perhaps intimate knowledge I should say, was the first step toward possessing anything. I knew every corner and inch of my apartment and the house I had grown up in. I knew Angela and large fragments of her sad history from when she was born until we separated, and I can say that each in some way was mine. Angela was my girlfriend and for three years my wife, and until I moved out of the basement apartment, with its secondhand furniture and low ceiling, it was mine as well. I had a more intimate knowledge of each, and therefore a greater claim on each, than anyone else living on this planet. Often when I went home from work on the subway at the end of each day, I thought to myself, I am going home to my wife. I am leaving for my home. The my was everything. Take that away and what did you have beyond a series of meaningless nouns — home, wife, car, dog, child. After one year at the academy, I began to think of English in the same way. First it was my class, and then it was my subject, and then my discipline, until inevitably I had finally claimed the entire language as my own.