The Assignment
Miss Irving’s voice is nasal but forceful. As she reads the essay, she pauses now and then and looks at the class—most of whom are sons and daughters of Jersey City’s Jewish middle class. I’m one of the few who isn’t Jewish, whose family is nowhere near middle class. She peers over her reading glasses to make sure everyone is attending to the strengths she’s found in the writing. I doodle circles on the cover of my notebook, embarrassed, tilt my head forward so my hair can shield the side of my face. Every week Miss Irving picks three of the strongest essays and reads them aloud, pointing out structure, word choice, tone. And nearly every week, my essay lands among the top three.
Miss Irving’s a tough bird, so it’s no easy trick to earn her praise. She offers her advanced writing class only to seniors who qualify. She’s probably been teaching at Snyder High School since the Truman Administration. The parents of a few of the kids in class had Miss Irving when they were seniors here. She’s tall, lean, and white-haired, with a reputation for unbending standards, thinks As should be treated like sweets and offered rarely. But she gives me more than my share.
That’s why I’m convinced that she’s not thinking straight. I’m accustomed to getting good grades, but no one’s ever singled me out before, put a spotlight on my writing. I don’t like attention, and I don’t usually get any. Certainly, not at home. Among kids at school, especially these kids, I’m mostly invisible. It’s a kindness, really. They’re never mean. They’re not into teasing. They just keep their distance, probably because I’m such an odd combination of good fortune and affliction. They assume I have some smarts, since I’m in all their classes, but they know I’m hiding something, that my diffidence isn’t just shyness. They get allowances to shop for new outfits. I get my sisters’ hand-me-downs. They’ve been accepted to Ivy League colleges. I’ll have to get a job and attend Saint Peter’s College at night. I’m not like them, no matter how much I mimic their ways. I’m not beautiful or beautifully dressed. I can’t relax and come up with the right things to say. I’ve been on countless honor rolls, but I can’t get my family to notice me, to see me as anything other than the egghead, the one who likes to get lost in her books. So Miss Irving’s attention baffles me.
She crowds the margins with comments and corrections red-inked in curly letters that get right to the point. Don’t repeat yourself. Or Where’s your evidence? When I write, I imagine I’m addressing her, shaping my arguments in a way that she’ll value, even if she might not agree. She knows I dislike outlining, so she’ll look for loose threads, points weakly defended.
I devour the comments, praise or blame, no matter, because it’s the first time anyone has truly listened to me. The essays allow me to explore almost anything. Miss Irving assigns editorials on the war in Viet Nam, the riots in Detroit last summer, reviews of TV shows and the comforting predictability of Perry Mason and Dragnet. I do my writing in secret. No one reads these essays but her, unless she shares them with the class. Until I see my marked-up paper, my writing never seems good enough. I worry what will happen once her class ends and there’s no Miss Irving to convince me otherwise.
Just a month before graduation, family is one of the last topics she assigns. Something about what keeps a family together. My first draft is a recitation of bromides about birthdays and holidays and big family dinners, all of it horseshit that has nothing to do with life in my family. I tear it up, start over, and out comes an eruption of ugly secrets, a cauldron of horrors great and small—of evictions, beatings, living without electricity, without food, with relatives, with roaches, with drunks. The details gurgle, impossible to suppress, split me open like I’m overripe and rotten. But I keep writing, manage to wipe up the overflow, till the essay bubbles with the roughest, most revolting moments in my toxic vat of a life. Miss Irving has no way to imagine such a life, so I imagine it for her. I give her a sense of what it feels like to be caught in a maelstrom of violence and neglect, to wish for change that can never happen.
Miss Irving’s habit is to walk up and down the aisles, placing each student’s paper face down on the desk. I turn mine over and see that her curly red writing is almost all on the last page. She ends with Please see me after class. Later, at her desk, she tells me this is the strongest essay I’ve handed in so far.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
She did not read it to the class, because across the top I’d written private. She takes the essay from my hand, places it on her desk, taps a long, crooked finger on the papers. “Someday I hope you’ll find a way to share these things,” she says, but I don’t answer. “They’re part of who you are,” she prompts, wanting a response.
I nod, because my throat has tightened and I can hardly speak. She folds the essay, slowly sharpens the crease with the tips of her fingers, hands it back to me. She can tell I’m close to tears. She pushes back her chair, gets to her feet. “They’re not all you are.” She sounds as if she wants to admonish rather than comfort me, as if she has no patience for my myopic way of measuring my worth. I sneak a glance up at her face, afraid she’s upset with me. She pats my shoulder, an awkward, hesitant gesture that doesn’t seem to come naturally to her. But it feels good, and I thank her.
“We’ll talk some more,” she tells me.
And we do.
