Carrie Pilby. Caren Lissner
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that would make a good modernist essay? I could invent something. Sometimes I feel…like a cockroach. Sometimes I feel like a swing set. Nah. I decided to write about being too studious. It wasn’t very intellectual, and it wouldn’t incorporate much symbolism. But what the heck. It was just one assignment.
During the second and third classes, Harrison didn’t mention the essays we’d turned in. We dissected various modernist authors. One kid in the class, Brian Buchman, was the biggest kiss-up I’d met yet, and at Harvard that was quite an achievement. If he’d been sincere, I would have admired him, but he had a tone that was clearly false. Half of what he was spewing was stuff I’d learned in high school, but he made it seem like he was discovering nuclear energy.
When the third class ended, and everyone was shoving their books into their natty black backpacks, Harrison called me up to his desk.
I stood there while Brian Buchman said goodbye.
“Do you have a few minutes, or are you in a rush?” Harrison asked me. “Do you have time to come to my office?”
“I have time.”
We walked down the hall to a pentagonal cul-de-sac with a wooden door in each wall. A few of the doors had yellowing newspaper cartoons taped to them. Harrison’s door was blank except for his name. We entered his office and he sat at a rusty metal desk. He had a few newspaper clippings taped to the painted-white cinderblock walls, and there were papers piled high on a broken chair. I’d heard before that academics got no respect, and the size of Harrison’s office proved it. He was a well-regarded professor, and this was what he had to work in.
Harrison leaned back. “I found your introduction very interesting.”
“Thanks.” I noticed there were no photographs on his desk.
“You said in your essay that you study too hard.”
“Well, maybe there isn’t such a thing,” I said, trying not to be nervous. “But some people say that.”
I remember noticing that he had a maroon sweater on and suddenly thinking it looked good on him. He had slightly wavy hair and intense brown eyes. He said, “Starting college at fifteen doesn’t sound easy.”
“Well, it’s not so hard academically. But…”
“Socially, it could be hard.”
I nodded.
“You sure you don’t have somewhere to be right now?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. This is my last class on Thursdays.”
“You the oldest in your family?”
“I’m an only child.”
“Mmm,” he said. “I had a younger brother. It created some tension when I got so much more attention in school.”
“Did you skip grades?”
“I only skipped one grade. But I found it hard. For you to have skipped three…that must have been quite an adjustment.”
I nodded again.
“How are you finding school?”
He looked straight at me. I hadn’t found anyone that interested in me since back when I had interviewed for college in the first place.
We ended up talking for more than an hour. We got to things I hadn’t told anyone. I told him about sitting in my dorm room freshman year, after my roommate had moved out, feeling miserable even though everyone kept saying how lucky I was to have the room to myself; I talked about the earliest smart things I’d said to adults that had made their eyes widen, like going up to a woman in the library when I was seven and pointing to her copy of Call It Sleep and saying, “That’s a good book.” I talked about figuring out how to play “Für Elise” on the inside of the piano when I was five. I stopped several times for fear I was boring him, but he kept urging me on. At times, he would reciprocate, telling a story about something smart he’d done as a kid, or a time he had felt out of place, and I almost felt as if he thought he needed to impress me. That was strange.
“One day, the boy who lived next door to me was reading a comic book on his stoop,” Harrison said. “He wouldn’t show it to me, so I stood in front of him and started reading it upside down, out loud. He was amazed, even though it’s not so hard to read upside down. He thought I was a genius. Then he ran and got a bunch of his friends, who kept giving me things to read upside down. They made me feel like some sort of superhero.”
I told him about something that had happened with a neighbor of mine.
“When I was in first grade,” I said, “this sixth-grader who lived on my block came up to me on the playground at school and told me he was doing a report and he needed an example of a case in which the First Amendment wouldn’t apply. All the kids used to ask me for help, even the ones who picked on me. I told him that yelling ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater was an example, even though we have the First Amendment right to free speech. Then, the next day, in the lunchroom, he ran up to me all out of breath and said, ‘Carrie! Carrie! You’ll never believe this! I looked in the encyclopedia, and they took your example!’”
Professor Harrison threw his head back and laughed. I realized then that the story was funny, and I laughed, too. He laughed some more, and that made me laugh more. The more we laughed, the more it seemed fun just to laugh, even after the joke had gotten stale. It was a good feeling that something that I’d merely considered strange in my childhood was now amusing, an experience to look back at and laugh about with someone. There were plenty of bad things that had happened—oh, if only I could recycle them into amusing stories! And Professor Harrison would understand.
But our time had to come to an end. Harrison looked at me and said, “Well, I know you have to move on.” I said, “Not really, but…” but he just laughed and got up. He shook my hand. His hand felt warm. I said I appreciated the discussion, and then I left.
As I walked back, my mind raced a million ways.
He was smart—no, brilliant.
He liked to hear me talk.
He encouraged me to talk more, and always had a response.
I felt more excited about the conversation than I had from any in years. But I also knew that this was probably the last time we’d spend that kind of time together—probably he was having those sorts of meetings with every student to discuss their essays, and probably they were all as enchanted as I was. And just like with my outgoing friend freshman year, I’d quickly move out of Harrison’s scope, overshadowed by people who were louder and more “fun.” Besides, surely, Harrison already had a throng of people outside of class that he belonged to. Former students, relatives, colleagues. He was great. How could people not swarm around him?
There was still relatively little I knew of him, but what I knew was terrific. I felt like I wanted to back him into a corner and quiz him for hours. And of course, I also wanted him to ask more things about me. I had been saving things up for years to tell someone who was interested, who cared.
Harrison hadn’t made fun of one thing I’d told him. He hadn’t said “whoosh.” He hadn’t barked “SAT word!” when I’d used a big word. He’d agreed with what I’d said and sometimes built on it. The most amazing discovery in the world is someone who understands what you’re about without your having to go through your entire life history to explain it.
But my time was over.
During the next class, my feelings were confirmed. I got no wink or knowing smile from Harrison. He didn’t single me out in any way. I was disappointed. I still thought I should mean more to him. Hadn’t we shared secrets? Weren’t we friends now, whereas everyone else was just a student to him? He had told me about feeling alienated and lonely as a boy. Were those things you told everyone? Had he told everyone?
I kept looking at him. He was so handsome, so smart, so steady. I doubted he’d ever been into getting drunk at parties.
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