Flyover States Read online

  FLYOVER STATES

  Grace Grant & P.J. MacAllister

  FLYOVER STATES

  Grace Grant dedicates this book to the memory of

  Robette Washington, teacher of English

  at Wakefield High School, and to teachers everywhere.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grace Grant would like to thank her parents, Bruce and Judy, and her sister, April. The author gives thanks, especially, to her friends for their ongoing support, help with edits and the occasional half-priced martini: Bernadette Murphy, Leonore Dluhy, Alexandra Cordero, Elaine McSorley Gerard, Erica Kan Dodd, Michelle Ross, Amanda Hong, Christina Cordero, Heather Angney Edelman, Megan Briggs, Steve Lookner, Larry Tanz, Dave Mandel, Dan Periera, Mike Mattison, Bill Wu, Vanessa Ward, Tyler Chapman, Jeff Galbraith, Karen Smith, Joseph Morrisey, Heidi Dollinger and David Prestidge.

  P.J. MacAllister would like to thank her family, Brian Ingram, Sabrina Williams, Mimi Lind and Cathy Bowman.

  Both authors especially thank their agents, Neeti Madan and Rosalie Siegel, for their dedication and support, as well as Ms. Madan’s assistants, Kate Prentice and Sarah Walsh; much thanks to Susan Gubar and Linda Charnes, for inspiration, for being invaluable mentors and friends; Kathryn Lye, our editor and advocate; Margaret Marbury for her vision; and, finally, neither author would have survived graduate school without Romayne Rubinas Dorsey, Damon Dorsey, Thomas Jones, Bob Bledsoe, Laura Yow, Len Nalencz, Scott Maisano and Melissa Jones.

  Contents

  Doris

  Ronnie

  Doris

  Ronnie

  Doris

  Ronnie

  Doris

  Ronnie

  Doris

  Ronnie

  Doris

  Ronnie

  Doris

  Ronnie

  Doris

  Ronnie

  Book Club Questions

  Ronnie

  Doris

  Doris

  I, Doris Weatherall, am in the process of becoming a hateful person, or a snob, or just flat-out bitter. Largely it’s because I have done-that-which-I-ought-not-to-have-done (begun relationship with pretentious, sexually ambiguous, any-fool-would-know-better poet-worse-yet-poetry professor), and not-done-that-which-I-ought-to-have-done (left town years ago, with or without my advanced degree, begun the process of falling for the standard married professionals and computer-dating last-ditch efforts like my citified sisters). Being in your early thirties and single is a challenge no matter where you are. Being in your early thirties and single in a college town in the Midwest is sort of like an extended episode of Sex and the City but minus the sex and minus the city. It is, of course, possible to have sex in the Midwest, just as it’s possible to drive two hours to Louisville or Indianapolis—both prospects having the same discouraging effort-to-payoff ratio.

  Qualification of the “snob” thing: the aforementioned is not to say that there are not highly datable, corn-fed, socially conscious examples of Midwestern hetero-male fabulosity. There are. They just generally get married at twenty-five, and probably don’t hit that first round of divorces until they’ve given it the real God’s-honest, Pat-Robertson-would-surely-approve, college try. Ages twenty-five to forty, menwise, might as well be the dead zone. Thus, the problem with my poetry professor, Luis Gonzales, who is famous in that other-poets-have-heard-of-him kind of way. He writes passionate odes about Latin American revolutions, but lives in a split-level with a satellite dish. Some students find this disappointing, but it doesn’t really bother me all that much. What’s he supposed to do anyhow—organize the skate-rat hippies who clutter the sidewalks over the summer with their “Anarchy” backpacks? I don’t think so.

  This afternoon, I’m meeting Luis at his office to go over my poetry portfolio from last semester. Second semester ended two weeks ago, and when classes aren’t in session, I avoid the English department like the plague. Valentine Hall, which houses the English department and most of the other humanities, is a grotesque architectural monstrosity at the heart of Langsdale University’s otherwise idyllic, colonial-style campus. Valentine was erected in the early 1970s, when hideous concrete towers were au courant, and it now stands out from the other buildings like some poor soul sentenced to wear parachute pants and shoulder pads for the rest of eternity.

  I would never have agreed to meet Luis at school, except for the fact that casual settings haven’t been working to my writerly advantage. The last time Luis and I “went over” my poetry was the weekend before last, when I met him at his house, and his critique of my villanelle somehow segued into a protracted make-out session on his brown leather couch. Then we tried again the following week over margaritas, to the same shameful end. I say shameful because Luis is technically still my professor, and professors carrying on with graduate students is about as classy and original as some 1950s boss schtupping his secretary. Shameful, too, because for all the naughtiness, it never gets very hot and heavy. I’ve been blaming it on bad timing, but it might be one of those square peg–round hole situations (or, as my friend Paolo insists, the problem is that I have a hole when Luis is really a “peg” man). Luis’s office is on the sixth floor, and I have my hair swept underneath a wide-brimmed straw hat, with dark sunglasses so as to be as incognito as humanly possible. No luck.

  “Doris,” I hear from behind me. “You have got to get a load of this. It’s Ripley’s believe it or not un-be-leeeevable.”

  Ronnie Williams, my very best friend in the whole of Indiana, is moving from the stairwell in my direction at twice her usual walking speed, fist clenched in workers-of-the-world-unite manner with a pamphlet of some sort that she’s waving in my direction.

  “Look,” she says, unfolding what I now see is a brochure for the university and holding it up like the menu board at some fancy restaurant.

  The brochure reads Work, Play, Learn: Langsdale University, and beneath it are four pictures of classroom scenes and sports events displayed like an overlapping checkerboard with a larger photo in the middle of an African-American woman playing tennis.

  “God,” I say. “That almost looks like you.”

  Ronnie pushes the brochure closer to my face. The tennis player has long dreadlocks pulled away from her face, and is wearing a pink-and-white-striped polo shirt that I associate with being a hip kid in the eighth grade. She’s smiling as if she just won Powerball.

  “Doris,” Ronnie says. “It is me.”

  “But you don’t play tennis.”

  “Not only do I not play tennis,” she says, “I have never, not once, held a racket in my life. I went to the English department, to listen to J. J. Jones lie to my face about why I didn’t get teaching this summer—it was the one thing I was looking forward to. Some nonsense about my ‘lack of experience.’ Anyhow, on my way out of her office, as though my head was not just filled to the brim with bullshit, I see a stack of these, bound up and waiting for delivery.”

  I take the brochure from Ronnie and look at it more closely. On further inspection, the picture looks more like a paper-doll version of Ronnie, where someone has superimposed two white terry-cloth wristbands and pasted a tennis racket on to her outstretched hand.

  “So what is this exactly?”

  Ronnie’s hair is pinned artfully up from her face, with a few stray dreads framing her high cheekbones. Her blue-green sundress is low-cut and breezy, and her full upper arms belie a lack of tennis or any other extreme physical activity. “Part of the university’s ‘diversity initiative.’” She looks angrily from one end of the deserted hallway to the next. “I got the runaround from three different officials, and finally someone fessed up to the fact that they digitally altered a picture that they’d taken of me shaking Professor Lind’s hand after some reading la
st year. They just cut me out, dressed me up, and figured that ‘for the sake of diversity,’ and I’m quoting Dean Stone on that one, I wouldn’t mind.”

  I hand the picture back to Ronnie carefully, as if it might self-destruct at any second. “This is insanity,” I say. “Aren’t they worried you’ll sue?”

  “Evidently not,” Ronnie says. “Not worried enough to make sure I get summer teaching. And now I have to get to the temp agency before they close, since my tennis-playing skills aren’t going to keep me fed this summer. And they wonder why black folks run like hell from Langsdale University. I could write three dissertations on the subject.”

  “Are we still meeting later?” I ask. “Paolo called. He’s expecting us at the Wing Shack at six.”

  “Fine,” Ronnie says. “Fine.” She keeps turning over the brochure in her hands, as if the picture might be different when she sees the front again. She shakes her head and sighs. “What are you doing here anyhow?”

  “Meeting Luis,” I say. “We’re going over my portfolio.”

  Ronnie puts the brochure into an overstuffed black book bag. “Really. Is that what they’re calling it these days? ‘Going over the portfolio’? You’ll have to fill Paolo in on the details. He’s still convinced Luis doesn’t have the proper…motivation?”

  “Paolo is jealous,” I say. “I’ll call you later this afternoon.”

  “Cool.” Ronnie shifts the book bag on her shoulder and heads out the door. I push the elevator button and wait. Our friend, Paolo, has been driving me crazy about Luis for the past month. While I may have been blessed with God-given taste in shoes and poetics, I am cursed with $3.99, blue-light-special gaydar. Luis is a tough case. He has had two wives (both now exes) and two affairs of the committedly heterosexual variety that I, personally, know about. Last wife: Barbie-esque styling babe that he picked up at an art colony three summers ago and lost two summers later. She was a stick-thin blonde who wore dominatrix heels and never bothered learning anyone’s name. I met her three times and I’m quite sure she couldn’t pick me out of a lineup.

  Anyhow, rumor had it that one of two things precipitated the end of CityBlondBarbie’s stay in Langsdale. Rumor (A): Luis was caught making out with an ex-student of his, Carla (or “Southern Bell,” as Ronnie called her), in the back of his very own house while CityBlondBarbie got plastered in their living room. Rumor (B): Luis was caught pants-below-his-knees with a “visitor” of the gender-not-named variety while CityBlondBarbie defaced his office door. What is known for sure: first, Carla and Luis did have some form of “encounter.” Second, Luis’s door, which was once cluttered with pictures of half-naked men, poets, of course, was stripped bare the day CityBlondBarbie left town.

  When I get to Luis’s office, the door is still bare, except for a note taped to the frosted-glass window: D, Back in five, L. I take the note off the door and remove my hat, smoothing my recently dyed hair down into a low ponytail. I was going for a rich, brown shade, but instead the color looks jet-black and severe. The hallway is deserted, and I slump down onto the floor outside Luis’s office, wondering if Paolo isn’t right about Luis.

  Things that I know to be true but am ignoring: First, an unspecified human of the hot-and-male variety has recently moved into Luis’s split-level love nest. “My cousin,” Luis told me. “In from Chile.” And second, male poets are, categorically and regardless of sexual preference, just below serial killers for undatability. They should come with little warning signs tattooed below their belly buttons— BEWARE: SUCKING PIT OF NEED.

  Luis finally is ambling down the hallway, apologizing and waving a bag of onion rings. His sandals make a hollow, slapping noise as he walks my way.

  “Low blood sugar,” he says, unlocking the door. I follow him into his office, which has his Harvard degree mounted prominently behind his desk. To the right of it is a framed copy of Luis’s first book of poems, a slim volume titled Claro that won him a National Poetry Series award. Luis looks tired to me, with big rings under his hangdog eyes. He’s gained a little weight. He’s five foot six in loafers (tasseled ones, but I’m not saying anything) and puts on the pounds easily. But Luis’s appeal has never really been predominantly physical: it’s more about how he reads a poem and the poems he writes—the attention he pays to the world around him. He does have nice hands, though, clean and well manicured.

  “My cousin,” he tells me, “he’s driving me crazy. So very Catholic. He still considers me married, in the eyes of God, you know, Catholic shit. I don’t want to upset him. Thinks anything but a first wife is desaseado.”

  “Diseased?” I asked, shifting my gaze to the framed portrait of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, bare-chested with arms entwined. Note to self: under “cousin” see “peg, not hole.”

  Luis sits down across from me. He tugs nervously at his left eyebrow, twisting the hair one way and then twisting it in the other direction.

  “That, too. He’ll be gone soon enough, no reason to rock the boat.”

  “Better be soon,” I say. “Or this here ship just might sail.”

  Luis passes me an onion ring.

  “It’s just a cousin. He wanted to look at Langsdale, see if he’d like to come.”

  “What kind of cousin?” I ask. “Kissing cousin?”

  Luis smiles, but it’s one of those fake smiles that uses just the mouth and not the rest of his face. When Luis really smiles, his eyes squint and the skin underneath looks thin and crepey. “You’re funny, Doris. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk about in your poems. I think you’re hiding behind humor, or just going for ‘cute’ in the endings. It’s not that they’re bad. They’re great. I want you to push yourself more. Your bird poem, it’s nice, but tidy.”

  He pushes one of my early poems across the table:

  Against Birds

  There is no wind that whistles in my soul,

  and my sympathies have never lain with birds

  above the earth and choked with song.

  When volunteers were needed (as a child)

  to feed three starlings to a snake, I raised my hand

  disdainful of those six- and seven-year-olds

  pleading clemency for starlings (as they might

  for rats, had they been winged). And when nothing

  remained but three small lumps, stretching

  and tightening the ebony plates, I wondered only

  when it ate again. And still if asked at parties

  by voices confident and shrill, “What animal

  would you like to be?” I cannot say for sure.

  But certainly a creature undersea, silent and gliding,

  able to withstand the pressure of something heavier

  than air.

  “The line break at the end,” he says. “I think maybe you should rethink it.”

  “Okay,” I say as Luis rifles through the packet of my work in front of him to hand over a second poem, chastising me for always resorting to form. I like that Luis gives a solid critique, that he’s actively engaged in my growth as a writer. It’s exactly the reason that I came to graduate school in the first place: to be challenged. Before I came to Langsdale, my only feedback on work was from my sister and a couple of disembodied editors at literary magazines scattered across the country. Here, I get immediate feedback and am pressured to improve. There’s not much room for complacency in a program where poetry is considered a vocation, not a hobby.

  Luis is almost finished with his onion rings, and I reach across the desk to wipe a bit of grease from beneath his chin.

  “No playing, Doris,” he says. “I have to pick Armando up from soccer, and I said I’d be there five minutes ago. Later this week?”

  “Armando,” I repeat. “Your cousin has a very Chilean porn-star name.”

  “Why would you say something like that?” he asks.

  Never mind, I think, but I’m looking at the picture of Kerouac.

  Luis walks me down the hall to the elevators. We ride the six flights do
wn together, making heavy eye contact, and before the elevator doors can open, Luis pushes the “close doors” button and kisses me, long and sweet.

  “I thought you said no playing,” I say.

  “I’m the professor,” he says, fingering the fringe around my blouse. “I make the rules, I change the rules.”

  “But school’s out,” I say, pushing his hand away playfully. “And aren’t you always telling us to break the rules?”

  “Just be fluid,” he says. “Open.” And then he switches back into full professor mode. “Especially in your work, Doris.” I roll my eyes yeah, yeah and Luis leaves me to pick up Armando. His gait is cocky, self-assured, and as he disappears from view, I see him high-five the supertattooed, latter-day Beat-poet from our workshop last semester. Openness and fluidity: good for the poetry, not so hot for relationships.

  I should qualify that I am not spending all of my time waiting for Luis to become more closed or rigid (no pun intended). With attraction, it’s all about fractions and proportion. My life, then, breaks down as follows. Luis counts for, maybe, three-fifths of a relationship, since Ronnie claims that “sometimes a cousin isn’t just a cousin,” and Luis has asked me to keep our relationship on the down-low. Option B is Chris, who constitutes two-fifths of a legitimate crush, since he services my computer and has the decency to look at me, on occasion, in a sexual manner.

  Chris works in the computer lab at the library, and is the only noncondescending member of the geek-patrol staffing the campus computers. Chris helps me when my sister gluts my mailbox with updates and instructions about her midsummer nuptials, and retrieves poems otherwise lost to the ages when I can’t get my floppy to open. With the rest of the staff, I come in with my malfunctioning disks and they look at me as if I’m still rubbing sticks together for fire.