Sans Souci
I was a single parent with a Corolla much older than my eight-year-old daughter and a one-semester contract that paid $9500 for teaching 240 students. Times were tough but with a car, a roof, a job, and my daughter, I counted myself lucky. Still, I worried about money. Though it wouldn’t do much to diminish my anxiety or augment the pantry, I took on a night course, Wednesdays from six to nine. I paid the kindly high-school girl next door to feed and watch over my little girl until I got home. I ached from being away — guilt, blood pressure, and speed all escalating on the way home to her on Wednesday nights.
I was hurrying home at 9:30. The streets were empty; rush-hour commuters by then were home and dry. At the bottom of a steep hill, I had to cross the trolley tracks running down the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. I started toward the tracks then slammed on the brakes. A flashy late-model coupe was barreling down the rise, tires on the tracks rather than the street. About five feet behind it whizzed a patrol car, lights spinning madly but no siren. The streetlamps lit up the uncannily silent scene brightly, so I got a brief but unforgettable look at the face of the fleeing young man behind the wheel. An earl in a wingchair perusing the Times at his club, a broker in a bull market with his feet up on his desk, a leading man lounging by his turquoise pool with his latest starlet — none would have appeared more at ease, nonchalant, or serene than that fugitive doing at least ninety on steel rails.
Whenever the little bottle of Stoicism I keep in the medicine cabinet doesn’t do the trick, whenever I feel my dignity dissolving like April snow, self-control flaking like a rusty handrail, I call to mind that insouciant miscreant behind the wheel, careless of the twirling blue lights, the slippery tracks, the inevitable crash and noisy, manhandling arrest. So far as I could tell, he was relishing the ride.
One registrant in my night class was an elderly woman, well over seventy. She never did the reading but always had plenty to say about it. Most weeks she knitted — click, clack, click — putting me in mind of the Viennese matron who, seated in the first row, exasperated Freud by click-clacking all through one of his public lectures. Freud pointed at the woman and observed that compulsive knitting was an excellent example of unconscious masturbation. The audience gasped, but the woman replied coolly. “Dr. Freud, when I knit, I knit; when I masturbate, I masturbate.”
I inserted a break midway through the three-hour class. We all needed it. The first week it lasted five minutes, the next ten. The final class in December was pretty much all break. Everybody was relaxed, incurious about Death in Venice, thinking about the holidays, as unconcerned as that placid outlaw racing down Commonwealth Avenue.
As I drove home after that last class, stopping to check both ways before crossing the trolley tracks, I vowed that this was the last time I would leave my little girl after dark. I thought I’d try to be more like that kid in the coupe. I would worry less. I began by deciding to stop being anxious about whether I’d done an adequate job for my night students, as weary from their day jobs as I was. I would give them all good grades.
At the end of our last class, the students surprised me with a gratifying round of applause. I was keen to get home to my little girl, but the students lingered, wanting to chat. The knitting lady brought out a tin of gingerbread cookies she’d baked for everybody, thanked me for a stimulating course, then dipped into her bag again and presented me with something wrapped up in brown paper. It was an ugly sweater, mammoth and misshapen. I’ve never worn this memento, but I’m still grateful.
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