Flyover States Read online

  I have the rest of the afternoon to kill before meeting up with Ronnie and Paolo, so I decide to make a trip to the lab to check my e-mail. Chris is hard at work at one with his keyboard, hair back in a hippie-blond tangle, the faint scent of patchouli wafting off his sunburned skin. The lower half of his Tweety Bird tattoo peeks out on the exposed half of his upper arm.

  “Got a zip drive yet?” he asks without looking up from the keyboard.

  “No,” I say, adjusting my straw hat. “You mind helping me with my e-mail? I can’t get it to open. I think my sister’s crashed my system again.”

  “You entered your password and everything, Lula Mae?”

  Chris slaps his thigh. He really cracks himself up commenting on my wardrobe.

  “I love this hat,” I say. “It’s fetching. I got it discount off the Web.”

  “Farmer-surf,” he says. “Did the flip-flops come with?”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” I say. “I have limited resources. You try looking cute with what passes for a mall in this town. They haven’t cycled the department-store racks since 1985, at the latest, and I may well be the only person who even notices.”

  The devil may wear Prada, but it’s safe to say that the rest of the country is making due with Old Navy. This is not to rag on Old Navy. I like both very much, and shop at Old Navy, but with an eye toward the fascist/fashionista New York–style goddesses. Which is not to imply that I respect and/or actively emulate their way of life, only to say that I acknowledge their existence by working for a funky knockoff version. Cheaper, less offensively classist and wasteful, but cute.

  “We can’t all look good in tie-dye,” I say, doing my half-assed flirt routine.

  “You can come over one day. I’ll dress you up regular.”

  Chris works at the computer keyboard like some latter-day mechanic, putting me to shame at the fact that I can merely write creatively, yet do nothing of any real value—even to myself. One of my ex-boyfriends visited me last year and told me that he’d never seen so many smart people who couldn’t figure out how to make any money for themselves. I could tell he was thinking “stoo-pid.” Such is the nature of graduate school.

  There’s nothing really wrong with graduate school, except that it’s one of those Brigadoon-like time-sucks wherein you enter as a fresh-faced twentysomething, and KA-BOOM the mist clears and a decade has passed. Amazingly, life has gone on around you, and you just have a stack of student loans plus in-depth knowledge of something no one else in the world cares about. In my case, it’s Latin American poetry, which I study, and Chatty American poetry, which I write.

  “Done,” Chris says. “Try signing in.”

  I type my username: DMWEATHE and password: writergal.

  Miraculously, my e-mail opens. There are seven new e-mails from my sister, Lisa, and her fiancé, Marvin. Seven. IDEAS FOR DRESSES. DON’T FORGET TO RESERVE NOW. TENTATIVE SCHEDULE FOR REHEARSAL DINNER. SHOWER IDEAS. To say that Lisa and Marvin have lost their collective mind is an understatement. You couldn’t even get my sister into a dress when she was a kid. Now you can’t get her out of one so long as the label reads Calvin Klein or Marc Jacobs. I’m supposed to be planning her shower, but it’s low, low, low on my list of priorities.

  “Two thousand sixty-eight e-mails in your in-box,” Chris says. “Do you delete anything?”

  “Shut up,” I say. “I haven’t read all of them yet.”

  I quickly open the “IDEAS FOR DRESSES” before Chris can get a good look at anything else in my in-box. I don’t want him seeing my shameful trail of sordid flirtations; it undermines my vixen-in-control vibe.

  Chris meanders back to the consultant’s station, and I’m left to my own devices. My feet are starting to itch, another problem with being reduced to fashionista-style knockoffs—lots of nonleather causing allergic-type reactions. I don’t know how the vegans do it. Until they make a nice hemp Mary Jane pump, I’m all about the leather. It’s funny, but in New York, I never cared that much about fashion. In fact, I was often a bit disdainful of the whole enterprise: anorexic tweens hocking ridiculously expensive fabrics and reveling in frivolity as if Isaac Mizrahi had discovered the cure for cancer, rather than simply making a decent pair of shoes or two. But in Indiana, I miss fashion the way I imagine Ronnie misses it being summer all year long. She says that in L.A. fifty degrees is freezing, and a simple rainstorm stops traffic. Yet here we are—coastal refugees—in the land of tornados and Keds.

  I forward the last e-mail from Luis to Ronnie with an attached note:

  Ronnie—Perhaps after wings we can scare up alcoholic-flavored beverages at the Office Saloon? You can traumatize ye olde bartender. I hear he got a haircut (whatever will you hold on to?). Must see evil interloper Zach. Will send voodoo curses at him and J.J. xo Doris

  After sending the message, I do my best to saunter by Chris’s station.

  “Later,” he says. His eyes don’t even move from the computer screen. Alas.

  Outside, the light is practically blinding. I fumble for my sunglasses, only to look up and realize that my e-mail has conjured Zach Patterson himself, fifty yards away, playing ultimate Frisbee with a group of graduate students who look vaguely familiar. He waves in my direction, and I pretend not to notice, opting instead for the “I can’t see anything behind these sunglasses” facade.

  Zach Patterson is an endless source of embarrassment and shame—the living embodiment of everything I do not want to become as a graduate student. He’s been here even longer than I have, TEN YEARS, just took his qualifying exams, and has been known to cut his toenails in public, at parties. Disgusting. More disgusting, the first semester I was here, I got very, very drunk on some pink wine and made out with him. I decided, in a Zinfandel haze, that he looked like Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets, which is sexual whiskey for the Irish in me. So, in the early months of my twenty-fifth year, I had a PG–13 encounter with Zach Patterson because I did not know that he had a veritable triumvirate of dating red-flags: a girlfriend, no direction and reprehensible grooming habits. I still think he looks a little like Mr. Keitel, with the squinty-brown-eyes thing, but in the absence of extreme youth and pink wine, have never even been tempted since. And now he is my TROOPS tutor: my right-hand man and coteacher for the next six weeks. And he’s the incarnation of a waking nightmare. Double the nightmare because Ronnie applied for that job, was turned down for “lack of experience,” so that the departmental über-slacker could be employed.

  Zach’s one genius move was to get in tight with J.J.—J. J. Jones is the faux-hippie controller of all teaching assignments. She is the closest thing that graduate students have to an actual “God” figure—the true arbiter of our destinies. J.J. has the leathery-skin, hair-past-her-ass look of some aged surfer-queen, but with a complete lack of Zen. If you don’t know her well, you’d think she could potentially be Zen, cool, what-not. That’s sure the vibe she’s after. She’ll use words like bitchen and dude and has the usual lefty rhetoric plastered all over the back bumper of her 1983 Volvo: “I’D RATHER BE SMASHING IMPERIALISM,” and “THE MORAL MAJORITY IS NEITHER.” But she’s careful, careful, careful only to pick summer teachers she doesn’t think will give her any trouble. I realize that this doesn’t say much for me since I was, in fact, selected by J.J. for this job, but it remains disgraceful that she didn’t pick Ronnie. She had precisely one actual, qualified African-American apply for the job, and she picked Zach—the white-boy toe-picker. Welcome to actual race in the academy.

  TROOPS is a series of classes run by the university each summer for first-generation, low-income college students from bigger cities like Gary and Indianapolis, or small farms from all over the state. It’s a how-to-write-and-study composition boot camp, and the one truly diverse classroom you’ll find on this campus. So much for Ronnie’s poster-girl status for Diversity, Inc.

  The program is called TROOPS because they put the students into these little “legions” in which they Work, Play and Learn for the summer. It also
means that as a class, they are largely won or lost as a whole, since they will run you up and down the flagpole if they sense any sign of weakness. Plus, they’re straight out of high school, which means that they’re always at least partially confusing TROOPS for a kegger/orgy, and my classroom for some 1980s Hot for Teacher video. During the regular year, undergrads generally confine their crushes to pseudo-stalker e-mails and stick with inventing distant-but-dear uncles and aunts who drop like fruit flies when the hangovers start piling on. Nor, might I add, is it to imply that I am some sexed-up librarian-by-day, pole-dancer-by-night kind of teacher. I am not. All that I am is “not butt ugly” and in teacher terms, that might as well be a pole dancer. I have a theory that some students would be attracted to a space alien if it showed up with a grade-book and functional sex organs. This theory is partially based on my own experience, as Luis, in all honesty, is not someone I would have picked off the street. Classroom erotics—a dicey business, indeed.

  Aside from being one of the rare instances where I feel even vaguely sexualized in my daily life, TROOPS is also a different experience because it’s the time that I feel most self-consciously white. I grew up in Brooklyn, and not once in my life did I feel so racially implicated as I do in Langsdale. When I was driving through Indiana to get to Langsdale, I spent the night in some tiny town where the local news was reporting on the KKK marching in honor of “white pride.” I thought they were kidding, but no, it was for real. My sense of the KKK was that they were as antiquated and—frankly—as out of use as phonographs and the rhythm method, but there they were. Not a civil-rights protestor in sight. It was like watching pink elephants on parade.

  This is not to say that I romanticize the East Coast as the land of peace and racial harmony, but in Brooklyn, one need not use a digitally enhanced photograph to create a black woman who plays tennis. It’s a wonder Ronnie doesn’t go postal on the whole lot of them.

  By the time I get to the Wing Shack, Ronnie and Paolo are already hunkered down over a plate of wings, and Ronnie has filled Paolo in on my visit to Luis’s office. Paolo is Ronnie’s and my newest friend, another West Coast transplant who refers to Luis as “Way Gay Faux Che,” thus condensing every rude, but possibly true, rumor about Luis into one neat moniker. This is Paolo’s gift, or his second gift, since his first gift is as a balletic demigod. He was once a principal dancer in the San Francisco Ballet, but now he wants to do arts administration. Run my own show, he’ll say. Paolo is canonically gorgeous, quite tall for a dancer with olive skin and enormous brown eyes. Even though he moved to Langsdale for the dance program, which is world renowned, he doesn’t like hanging with other dancers. Always with the upchuck, he’ll say, motioning a finger down his throat. I’ve had my career. Now I want to drink in peace, not watch a bunch of pubescent girls count the bones they can see through their leotards.

  I think Paolo over gay-ifies Luis, but the rumor has always been that Luis doesn’t actually know Spanish. Supposedly, one of his grad students of ages past (with whom he was probably sleeping, but that’s beside the point), brought him some untranslated Neruda and he completely flailed. Luis is always talking about his Chilean roots, and while he was, indeed, born in Chile, he was also raised in suburban New Jersey. The Spanish I get from him is largely the kind I imagine coming from a book to get frat boys laid internationally on their spring breaks. I’m not sure it’s a testament to anything.

  “Doris,” Paolo asks me as I sit down on the wooden bench next to him and pick out a chicken wing and some celery for myself, “ask Luis if it’s getting stuffy in the old gabinete, el amario.”

  With one semester of “reading” Spanish, I can’t even pretend to understand.

  “El closet,” Paolo proudly translates. “And that ‘cousin’ of his? Not in there with him. Cómo se dice ‘flaming’?”

  “Paolo,” I say, “Cómo se dice ‘mind thine own business’?”

  “Fine,” he says. “But don’t make me remind you that you once upon a time had a crush on me.”

  Ronnie has been fully engrossed in a plate of the red-hot special until that moment, but even she puts down a chicken wing to further the hard time Paolo is giving me.

  “Doris,” she says. “That is just sad.”

  “He could have been straight,” I say defensively. “Think about it, if Paolo were your ballet teacher, and you had to normalize ballet wear, and factor in the profession, there was like a thirty-three percent chance he was straight, or kind of bi, and I’m an optimist.”

  Ronnie can barely keep her chicken down.

  “There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I can’t even begin to count.”

  As many things as Ronnie can count, up that by a factor of ten and you have what’s wrong with being single in Langsdale. Which keeps Luis in the running, if only for the short term.

  “Not as many as are wrong with this,” Paolo says, procuring the brochure of Ronnie in her tennis gear. Ronnie closes her eyes and shakes her head. “Maybe it’s because your last name is Williams. Maybe they thought that you could be the lost Williams sister. Venus, Serena and Veronica. You’d be like the eighth wonder of the Midwest.”

  Ronnie snatches the brochure from Paolo’s hands.

  “Wonder if they can airbrush me into a Valtek office,” she says. “Because that’s where I’m going to be spending the rest of my nights.”

  “You mean days,” Paolo says cheerfully, arranging his chicken bones neatly across his plate.

  “No,” Ronnie says. “I mean nights.”

  “What kind of office works nights?” I ask.

  “Hooker!” Paolo says. “You’re a temporary hooker! It’s so Julia Roberts.”

  “More like Norma Rae,” Ronnie says. “It’s a factory. Maybe they have some documents that need editing. They weren’t too clear on the details. Next week I have to meet some dude named Ray.”

  “Ray,” I say. “Maybe he’s a ‘Billy Ray’?”

  “Probably a Bubba Ray, with the way my luck’s going. Probably has some confederate flag and David Duke for President sticker shined up on the back of his made-in-America pickup.”

  “Cynical,” Paolo says, pushing his plate across the table.

  Ronnie picks up the brochure and dangles it from between her index finger and thumb.

  “Okay,” Paolo says. “If you’re not back by morning, we’ll call someone.”

  The next day, I sleep later than usual and wind up rushing to make it to campus on time. The back seat of my Toyota is a disaster area, cluttered with poetry drafts and student evaluations from last semester. I push the papers into a lopsided stack to give some semblance of order; then I drive by Starbucks and pick up a double-latte to make sure I’m alert for the meeting.

  Some days, driving down the streets, it’s still hard for me to believe this is where I live. Langsdale, Indiana, land of Walnut Bowls, “Liquor, Guns and Ammo” ads, Libertarians who meet in coffee shops to politely discuss overthrowing the government and pharmacies where you can buy vodka in the aisle next to the tampons because you can’t buy vodka in the grocery stores.

  If it took me a while to get used to Indiana, it was worse for Ronnie. As I mentioned, she came from L.A. where she’d lived her entire life. The first time we went for a walk on one of the trails near campus she pointed to a robin and asked, “What’s with the pigeons with the red chests?” We bonded over lost shopping opportunities, a love of writing and an absolute belief that people evolved so as to keep nature at bay. No hippie degeneration for us. I expect her to slap me and call for an airlift to a designer shoe warehouse if I so much as look at a pair of Birkenstocks. Not even for the hippie-love of Chris.

  Once on campus, I head directly for the meeting and seat myself next to Mandy, one of the less militant lesbians in the department and a very fine teacher. She and I are sharing Zach as a tutor. Lucky us. Mandy isn’t a hippie proper, but she definitely prioritizes comfort over fashion, she’s wearing cargo pants and Tevas with a white T-shirt. It’s her
standard summer uniform. She has small, precise features and bobbed brown hair. If I took her to the MAC counter, she’d be capable of a showstopping makeover. Never going to happen. In Langsdale, the “natural” look is always in.

  Mandy is actually friends with Zach, who is, of course, guaranteed to be at least fifteen minutes late.

  “Why Zach?” I whine, pulling my feet out of my shoes and rubbing the sweaty upper part against the back of my calf.

  “He’s the best tutor,” Mandy says. “Look around.”

  I do look around. It’s like being on the magic mountain—everyone’s pasty-faced and looks vaguely ill, bespectacled, hunch-shouldered, tight-lipped with the requisite underfed-yet-flabby body type.

  “They should have picked Ronnie.”

  “She applied?” Mandy asks, eyebrows raised like little daggers.

  I nod conspiratorially. Mandy actually likes J.J., a fact that I superficially chalk up to lesbian solidarity, but she looks appropriately and legitimately disgusted by the news.

  “J.J. didn’t pick her? Any reason?”

  I shake my head.

  “Damn,” Mandy says. “You’re never safe.”

  It’s true. Sometimes it feels as if we’re on some crazy game show where contestants get picked off one by one for no apparent reason. And for less than minimum wage. My ex-boyfriend was right. We are stooooo-pid.

  “So what’s she going to do for money?”

  “Temp,” I say. “I guess. It’s slim pickings around here over the summer. I don’t think loans are an option anymore, since she’s just taking the one course.”

  “What’s she taking?” Mandy asks.

  “Professor Lind’s class,” I say. “Something about Shakespeare and the sublime. I just know that since it’s Professor Lind and a serious workload, she didn’t want to take a second class, and that leaves her financially up a creek.”