Certified English Teachers
All Encouraged to Apply!
I skimmed over the ad the first time through the classifieds that morning. An out-of-state contact number didn’t excite me very much. I’d just graduated mid-year from BU with an English degree that nobody cared about. My savings ran out sometime around junior year, and now that school was done my parents wouldn’t foot any more bills. I had to move off of Mission Hill and back home to a Cape Cod cow-town that didn’t even have a supermarket. Back in Boston, my roommates were all en route to jobs at State Street and in Copley Square, swigging beer from keg cups and calling me at three a.m. to tell me to man up and get up there to do a shot. City living had led me to ditch my car, so I was stuck. Anna, my girlfriend, was still at Northeastern but she was just a sophomore and had forever and six days before she finished. She was going to be a pharmacist. The purest thing that college teaches you is that there isn’t any rush to break into the real world. In the back of my mind I tried to collect ways to move back to Boston, but all I got were echoes.
My parents moved their bedroom downstairs to give me some space, but I still had no money. I tried to apply to teach at my old middle school. The same three English teachers were still there, collecting dust and five-by-five essays about basketball and slumber parties. That left me with three options: pump gas at Texaco, work the register at Cumberland Farms or substitute teach. I got on the list to sub.
The school only called on nice sunny days, whenever regular teachers didn’t want to work. I drank a lot to kill the time, even on school nights. I’d sit upstairs in my old bedroom, writing poems to Anna that I never would send, on a rusty typewriter. If I did go to bed, I slept with the phone under my ear to make sure I’d wake up when the secretary called.
The local guys who I used to pal around with were all gone. I’d see their parents at the bank or Bonneville’s, buying milk. The only one who ever recognized me was Chris’s mom. She told me he was selling real estate in Indiana and getting married to a German girl. I saw her at the park, on a warm evening when I was riding around on my bicycle drinking Jack Daniels. Later, that exact same night Anna called to break up with me.
She was working in some lab on her co-op. She was probably the prettiest girl I’d ever dated. We met on the T about a year ago, on her way back to school before she transferred, in the midst of sixty other girls doing the exact same thing. There was nothing magic about the whole thing. I just picked the best looking one to talk to, way in the back by the sliding doors, watching the walls zip by through the window. The rest just happened.
First she asked how it felt to be at home. Then she asked if I missed Boston. In my head, I told myself that Boston was fake like California, that everybody loves to say it’s where they come from, but they really belong to somewhere else.
“I miss you,” I said.
An awkward pause ballooned, a whole lot of nothing between us. There isn’t any way to break up with someone that’s not corny, so she said some corny things while I listened in the dark. I could hear the TV in my parent’s living room downstairs.
“So I guess you won’t be able to score me drugs after you graduate,” I joked.
She said she wouldn’t have anyway, in a genuinely sad voice. Later I tried to write another poem, but the F key kept sticking.
When I woke up the next morning I called that ad from the paper. The secretary from the school had called me at five-thirty to work, but I croaked something meanly at her and slept until ten. The area code turned out to be Washington D.C.
An automated voice answered politely and asked me to hold and not worry about beeps or clicks. Five minutes passed and I was about to hang up when a gruff voice answered the phone. He sounded vaguely like the guy who does all of the movie trailers, only maybe a pitch higher and raspier, like if that guy were about to die if he hasn’t already. He didn’t greet me at all, just asked what I knew how to teach. I told him English.
“The language, or books and all that other crap?”
“Books and crap.”
“How long?”
“Just substitute stuff,” I said.
“Perfect.”
I heard him rifling through papers and breathing heavy into the phone. Then he asked me basic stuff, name, age, marital status and whatever.
“Send your resume to this address,” he said, then recited a place in Virginia. He made me repeat it back to him before he hung up the phone without saying goodbye . . .
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