I have wondered more than once whether, if a bank teller
drew on my hands with one of those counterfeit bill detector markers and forced
them under the light for examination, I’d have tells like those of a fake
twenty.
The word fraud
crosses my mind sometimes as I work stage right and stage left in the classroom
talking big about reading and how the best way to become a good writer is to
read lots and often.
It crosses my mind as students will ask, as they often do,
whether I’ve read fill in the blank off the bestseller list, and I say
something about not preferring contemporary lit or something about having been
too busy with student essays. A good mood will get you a “That sounds great!
I’ll put it on my list for between semesters,” and that may, now that I think about it,
register as the emptiest promise I make, very nearly a borderline lie. I just
don’t have the heart to break yours.
I cannot tell you the jaws I’ve dropped because I haven’t
read any Stephanie Meyer, have gotten only halfway through the first book in The Hunger Games series, and finished
exactly one Nicholas Sparks book before throwing it as hard as I could across
the room. It was The Notebook, and
I’m still not sorry.
I manage still, believe it or not, to classify myself as a literate person
despite this. I have read books before. Yes, complete books, start to finish. I
have marked them up. I have passed them along. I have bought multiple copies
because I wasn’t sure (multiple times) whether I still had my own. To illustrate,
note that I can locate four copies of Eat,
Pray, Love by moving my head left to right without even trying hard to spot them, and Liz Gilbert, although she is grand, is not counted among my
favorites. Let’s just say I felt convicted while watching Mel Gibson’s
character in Conspiracy Theory as he
compulsively bought copies of The Catcher
in the Rye although he’d never read it.
What gets me is when people ask what I’m reading these days.
I want to make something up. I do. I want to say I’ve just read Salman
Rushdie’s latest and tell them an anecdote from a Sherman Alexie book. I want
to go all gaga about Anne Lamott’s newest one, which I know I’ll love if I
ever have a moment to myself. I want more on my tongue and my mind than article
snippets about the demise of public schools and higher ed and Julianna
Baggott’s brilliant Facebook status updates I peruse while rocking the smallest
lovenugget in the house—or maybe her and her brother at the same time if he’s
jealous or recovering from a tantrum.
People see me in Barnes and Noble wearing a baby, carrying
another nearly upside down under my armpit, juggling a stack of books, and
calling the first child to come along with her own tallish stack. They probably
think I read. I’m sure the family friend who brings our Amazon Prime packages
with super-rushed delivery because I need those unread books now believes I
read, too, and read fast because she’ll be back tomorrow as well. My
homeschooling friends I bump into at the public library during weekday story
hours probably think I read. I’m in all the right places that one should be if
one were to read someday.
Babywearer Jr. |
Even online I look like a reader. Every social media
photograph has a mess of books behind a baby. These pictures aren’t
strategically taken; it’s just that the books are everywhere, much like the laundry, so it is rather impossible to
take a baby picture without White Noise,
White Teeth, or White Oleander in the background. I’ve given up trying to be
private about what we’re reading (or planning on reading) nearly as much as
I’ve given up trying to hide my son’s Toy
Story underwear.
I want to tell them that this literature professor is
reading. The truth is I’m not—not entire books, not in long sittings, not for
pleasure. And what does that even mean to someone in my season of life? Reading
for pleasure. As opposed to what?
Reading for torture? Reading for edification? Reading, to me, means your
eyes are awake enough to be open and your situation is relaxed enough where
your eyes aren’t already committed to watching someone jump off a couch arm or
scale a stove.
Reading means you must be holding a book, which means you
haven’t lost complete feeling in the arm that’s holding the baby you cannot put
down because she has a runny nose and can’t breathe while lying horizontally.
Reading means there must be clean forks in the drawer and cups in the cabinet.
It means the dog isn’t whining to be let out or let in. It means you’re not
hungry, you’re not cold, and you don’t have to pee or work or yell at someone
to do either of these things.
You cannot read for
pleasure when the act itself is pleasure. To correct the redundancy, I
would say it’s just reading, but I
cannot leave that alone on the page. Nothing is just reading, and if it is, you’re doing it wrong.
After a full day in the kitchen trying to bake, puree, and
freeze some semblance of stay-at-home motherhood while I am not Dr. Price for a
few more days until the semester starts, I crawled under the covers, ignoring
the piles of work on the floor, a veritable obstacle course of envelopes, grade
sheets, receipts, binders, and oversized books that don’t fit onto shelves. I
broke the spine of Tina Fey’s Bossypants,
and read fifty pages, my eyes not yet burning from the day, the kitchen cleaned
and hallway cleared of Lego traps, tiny plastic horses, and things with wheels,
and all the Price babies in bed. And words of comfort I’ve offered to students
over the past eleven years circled back around and came to me this time.
This is what we do
when everything is fine.
I’ve said that line to students going through divorces,
hospitalizations, miscarriages, deaths in the family, job losses and
changes—the things that wear us into different people, that make us want to
mess with time, to speed it up or slow it down, and make us want to mess with
space, to get more of it or less of it—to be at any other pace or place than
that which we are.
This is what we do
when everything is fine.
I say this to illuminate the comparative lightness of
academics when looked at alongside the stuff of life. They hear me preaching,
preaching, preaching about syntax and style. They hear plagiarism warnings that
conjure eschatological imagery. It matters, but it doesn’t matter. “There is no
such thing as an English emergency,” I tell them.
This is what we do
when everything is fine.
I spent the better part of thirty years reading what others
gave to me, bought for me, or assigned to me. I recall a small window in my
late teens where I camped out on bookstore floors and stayed out late in coffee
shops reading everything in sight. I recall switching books with my best friend
Kim, having marked up key passages we loved with circles and stars everywhere,
playing poems on repeat in the car from Fort Walton Beach to Pensacola to
memorize tracks on audiobooks. I remember moments of resurgence between
semesters in grad school #1 and grad school #2 after my daughter had entered
school where reading happened.
Good reading like that doesn’t happen often anymore. I used
to have a series of lengthy, monogamous and semi-monogamous relationships with
authors. Whitman was mine all of from 1996-1998. I rebounded with Bukowski all of 1999,
then Anne Sexton moved in and brought all her friends. They camped out until…hmm. Okay, so maybe they’re still here, hiding in the walls and under the
floorboards.
Now my desk, bedside table, and the backseat of my car are overflowing with student work and lit anthologies. I pick up the same toys twelve times a day, probably more, and put them with the Where's Waldo? and I Spy books we use as a hard surface for coloring and Play-Doh molds. I reach blindly into backseats to toss my son a book from the floorboard because he sees my older daughter reading. Half the time, I don't know what I've thrown him. It's entirely possible that he's held David Sedaris, The Vagina Monologues, or a Chuck Palahniuk. I'm not even supposed to text and drive; how on earth can I be responsible for monitoring a miniature book club in the backseat during the ballet carpool?
And a breath here.
As I ended the day with a book in my hands and quiet in the
space between me and midnight, the most beautiful thought occurred to hint that I might
be emerging from the dark tunnel to at least a sliver of light on the other
side.
How am I doing this? How is it possible that I am in a room alone, holding my own book in my hands, with no one sitting on either of my legs? I am reading this sentence, and I can hear myself in my own head.
There is only one way I could be doing this. I know exactly what this means.
Everything is fine.