Limbo

The thing about interning is that you’re just never entirely convinced. At any moment, it feels like the work you’ve done and the effort you’ve made could just go up in smoke. At the end of my six months at the publishing house, the understanding is that if they are unable to hire me, they’ll “make a few phone calls.” At least, that was the understanding that I tried to voice during my original interview, and again after three months when I sat down with my managing editor and got my second offer. Now, however, I entertain doubts. I’m in debt, and I don’t know whether I should keep on top of job searching and I really don’t want to.

It’s a dull sort of niggling sensation, behind everything that I do or feel these days. It’s aches, this lack of certainty. Sleep deprived, I ride the trains to and from this gorgeous city and I want to move there but I persuade myself that I can’t, not yet. There is too much to figure out first, too much unknown.

It could all vanish—San Francisco, writing, editing—just like that. I would have to scrap it and start over again, and who knows where I’d end up. I had a conversation with my best friend from high school recently, and she voiced something that I’ve heard a number of times over the last year, from various close friends, in various refrains.

“You know, Becky, I have friends that I worry about,” she smiled, “but you’re just not one of them. I know you’re going to be fine.”

“Yeah, well, I wish I knew that,” I laughed.

Time is never wasted. I’ll have learned something, after 6 months, right? As long as I truly believe that, that can’t vanish, surely.

And so I keep riding trains and repeating to myself, the promise that the rock of the world was founded securely to a fairy’s wing, perhaps, after all.

An Ode to Tutoring

“WHETHER I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens



* * *

It’s Saturday morning at 8:45 AM and I am already fully dressed, sitting in a classroom and sweating bullets.

The high school students are on their way.

It’s a practice SAT morning, and for the first time in my life, I’m not taking the test. I’m proctoring, another one of the many benefits that comes from working for a test prep tutoring company.

I can’t remember being more scared of anyone in a really long time. In my mind it doesn’t feel like so long ago at all that I was at Taft, but scanning the room, I don’t recognize these people. They terrify me. They almost look like adults but they’re not. I am sure that given the incentive, they would eat me alive. How is it that anyone actually teaches difficult subjects? All I have to do is watch a clock (I forgot my stopwatch at home, of course), and even so I’m at the brink of a nervous breakdown. I’m sure they could mutiny at any moment, and there would be absolutely nothing I could do.

23 has never felt older. A couple of days ago I learned that Heidi Montag is 22—a year younger than me! I felt stunned but silly at the same time, aghast that I’m starting to overtake celebrities and that shows and movies and popular narratives are no longer centered around my age group. Superficial for knowing let alone caring who Heidi Montag is.

Even worse, I’ve turned into the kind of person who willingly gets up early on Saturday morning, puts on a company t-shirt, and sits through a 4 hour exam because her day job pays so lamely that she simply needs the money. I’m pretty sure my 16 year-old self would emphatically not approve (especially with regards to the t-shirt). She would have never made these choices. Or would she?

There was so much I didn’t like about that person when I was her—her awkwardness, her inability to talk to boys, her incredibly harsh treatment of certain friends—that I have a hard time separating all that embittering and clouding insecurity from what she actually must have been like. I am sure she was quiet and smart and inept. I suspect she seemed promising to her teachers and parents. I wonder how much of her is still here, in whatever it is that I’ve become, and honestly, what she would make of me.

A Fear of Homelessness

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Bauer, had strong feelings regarding the treatment of homeless people.

She was a tall, kind woman. We had just finished a unit on saving the wetlands. You could tell that Mrs. Bauer was the kind of person who really cared about this kind of stuff, and not just because you had to. Sometimes I imagined her at home in the evenings, worrying about the environment. I would picture her and her husband at the dinner table, discussing important issues.

"Mr. Bauer?" she would say.

"Yes, Mrs. Bauer?" Mr. Bauer would pause, a forkful of green beans suspended in midair.

"I've been worrying about the Great Blue Herons."

And so on.

Mrs. Bauer had me anxious on behalf of the herons, myself. I tended to take these things pretty seriously. After our unit on conserving electricity, I was vigilant about shutting the fridge as quickly as possible.

"Don't leave that door open!" I'd admonish my dad, innocently pouring himself a glass of milk. "You're killing salmon."

On this fateful day, however, we were not discussing the murder of fish or the endangerment of birds. Mrs. Bauer had turned to humanity. She was talking about how we should consider and treat the people around us in our little, second-grade lives. It was a major topic of hers. Since the beginning of the year, Mrs. Bauer had stressed the golden rule, "Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you." She encouraged all of us to think about where another person is coming from, and to try to put ourselves in his or her shoes ("Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins," suggested reading: Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech).

Mrs. Bauer was on a roll today. She asked us about homeless people. What we thought of them. How we thought most people treated them. I pictured this one guy who hung out on 23rd Street. My dad called him a "bum." I always held my dad's hand and went around the other side of him when we had to go past this guy on the way to Escape From New York Pizza. I would walk fast and try not to look at him and even hold my breath a little bit. I was wondering how and if he ever cleaned his beard when Mrs. Bauer really let it rip.

"The next time one of you sees a homeless person," she held all of us, hypnotized, in her gaze. "I want you to think--once, this person had a home. Once, they had a family, just like me. They are not so different from you or me. Who knows what has happened to them in their life. Any one of us could become homeless."

Anyone could become homeless.

Mrs. Bauer let this sink in. And sink it did. Anyone could become homeless. It didn't take me long to make the logical leap.

I could become homeless.

I thought about it on the walk home. I thought about it while I was doing my homework. I didn't think about it so much during dinner, because it was Chicken Divan and it was really good, but that night, brushing my teeth and climbing into bed, it came back to me.

Anyone could become homeless. I could become homeless.

I doubt that for my classmates this lesson was much of an event in their lives. But for the overly imaginative child, the child whose yuppie parents didn't allow her to watch television, the child who read too many romantic Black Stallion novels, well, it was another story. My eight year old self was ingrained with a fear of homelessness from this point on her life.

I believe that Mrs. Bauer's words stuck with me growing up. They encouraged me (or terrified me, as you would) to be a better student. I think it may be argued that an accute fear of homelessness may develop later in life to a larger fear of failure: of not getting the score on the test that would get the good grades that would earn the good internship that would secure the good job that would prevent, ultimately, homelessness. It all comes back to Mrs. Bauer.

I am not sure if my 8 year old self is as silly as she seems or wiser than us all. Not to wax Dickensian, but in a sense, after all, there's not so much that separates me, or any of us, from destitution. A few people in my life, but people are mortal. My health and my intelligence, my freedom from any major addictions, but these things too have been known to decline or fail. My good fortune. In the end, I think it mostly rides on that.

Work hard, my friends, and stay healthy. Anyone, after all, can become homeless.