Martha

She loves birds.

We have feeders in the back, on the porch, and in winter we fill them with seed. Sometimes, then, at breakfast, she watches them out the glass door that opens off the dining room. She watches them move, flitter, dash from one side to the other.

Sometimes she will call me out from my office. “There’s a cardinal!” Whispered urgently. Commandingly. Or “A blue jay!” Sotto voce. I’ll come. I’ll look. I’ll see a flash of color. A streak of red or blue. Nothing more.

They reveal themselves to her. Their friend and protector. Not to me.


*

Conversely.

She hates the squirrel that lives out back in the neighbor’s tree, and who comes and gorges himself at the feeders. She wouldn’t mind, I think, if he were not so clearly making a pig of himself. If he only ate what he needed and then left the rest.

But that is not the way of squirrels, and he gobbles up the seed until his cheeks bulge and his stomach sways.

Thus, there is a war between them, my wife and the neighbor’s squirrel. When she sees him she yells or bangs on the window. He rears up and regards her for a moment. Then, face down and tail up, he goes back to the trough.

She opens the door and the squirrel finally dashes away (but not too fast). Sometimes she throws something after him. A stale piece of bread or something that she was going to put out for him later. It falls into the snow in the yard.

In about an hour, he’ll be back. And the whole thing—the feeding, the yelling, the tail in the air, the tossed crust—will repeat itself.

Sometimes, I think they enjoy it.


*

For many years, she was a teacher. Now she is teacher of teachers. Do not make the joke about those who can’t, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach teachers. I’ve seen people make it in her presence. They have not done it twice.

More importantly, do not say such things to those who were her students.

They might well slaughter you.

*

They adore her. I mean her students.

For twenty years now she’s been in the Department of Education at Tufts. She takes young people who are often little more than children themselves and, somehow, makes them into teachers. She equips them, I don’t know how, to deal with adolescents and parents, school boards and politicians, lesson plans and No Child Left Behind.

It has been hard on her, these last few years. The Bush administration confused excellence with obedience. Men and women who could not tolerate their teenager at home, never-the-less were certain they knew best how to manage classrooms of a hundred of them.


*

Then there is the academy itself. Martha is not, technically, a professor. She is, technically, a Lecturer. This means she cannot obtain tenure. She cannot vote in certain important assemblies. She is regarded, in ever so polite a way, as Not Quite Top Drawer. Or Dwawer, as they like to say, in the counterfeit trans-Atlantic accents of a certain class of academic.

This is because Martha is, well, a mere technician. She has actually taught in schools. She works with real students. She goes out into public schools and finds placements for student teachers.

These are lesser things.

The REAL educational academic works in theory. And abstraction. And grand insights. And, if possible, never sees a human being. Or, at least, not a student.

So . . .

So she is not tenured. Will never be tenured. And, sometimes those of her colleagues who are say things, “I think we’re seriously under-theorized here.” Meaning that her wisdom, derived from actual evidence, must not be as good as their dogma, derived from wishful thinking.

But, here’s the rub. In times of trouble, when this student is in crisis, or that funding has vanished . . . it is to Martha that they turn.


*

As I say, her students adore her. For years after they’ve left her classes, they send Christmas cards and email.

For some reason she is a particular favorite of those of her students who are minorities—the young men and women who are, as they say now “people of color.”

I’m not sure why. Maybe it is because she never manifests that evangelical and self-congratulatory tolerance of diversity, so common among Right Thinking People, so obviously synthetic, so loudly proclaimed. She is not, in other words, like one of her colleagues, a white middle-class woman with a Ph.D. and a six-figure income, who once slipped and began to lecture a black woman on what it was “really like” to be “Coloured In America”.

*

Some of my wife’s students have announced that they are adopting her. She is to be, they say, their mother.

One of these is Faith.

Faith is a tall, thin, energetic “woman of color.” She is bright and intelligent, very Southern, and her eyes glow with barely suppressed mischief. She has taken to calling Martha “Mom.” My son, David, is “Little Bro.” Recently, I’ve been promoted to “Dad.”

This leads to some interesting situations, many of them engineered by Faith herself. Recently, we took her for her birthday to a little tourist town up the coast. It’s a place with ocean views and small shops. I quite like it, but it tends to attract a—shall we say?— unadventurous crowd. Don’t get me wrong. The tourists are not evil. They are not bigoted. But they are very, very suburban.

We went into one of the shops. It had tall shelves reaching almost to the ceiling. That meant that you could hear the other customers in the place, but you might not be able to see them.

I was coming around a corner when I heard Faith yell cheerily, “Oh, Mom! Did you see this?” She was holding some piece of Mexican tinwear. “Isn’t it terrific? I’m going to have to get that.” Then, “Dad! I left my purse in the car. Would you tell me where you parked so I can get it?”

Around me I heard the amused murmurs of my fellow customers.

I told Faith I would get the purse and she could stay there, with “mom.” Next to me, a woman of my age said, smiling, “Or Dad will just end up paying for it.” I nodded. She turned the corner with me. She saw Faith.

Her smile froze like water on a windshield in February.

*

As I say, it has been hard for her, these past few years.

A bunch of reasons for that. David has gone to school and is no longer in the house, which is good and inevitable, but still …hard. And then there was the fact that I went back to school, and it proved such a disaster, and she had to watch.

Then, finally, there have been the Times. Our age. The last eight years . . . 9-11, the War in Iraq, so much more.

On some level, I don’t think she really minded the fact that Washington went Conservative during those years. She’s a liberal, but she can reach out to the other side . . . so long as it is real. So long as it, too, is idealistic. So long as it strives for some sort of good, though she may not agree on the definition of good.

But, Washington for the last eight years has been so very much not idealistic, not concerned with good … its ideology not conservative but merely hateful, a faux-conservatism that disguised blatant greed and power-lust as Family Values and Morality.

So, she has suffered.

There is still a part of her, you see, that genuinely believes in the virtue of men and women . . . despite all the evidence to the contrary.


*

I think, on some level, she remains the girl she was in the sixties. I’ve seen pictures of her then. She was oh-so-achingly young. Her hair was long and straight. She wore bright colors and jeans. She drove a VW beetle. She had the albums of Peter, Paul, and Mary. She believed . . . as God was her witness . . . that things might be made better.

I wish I had known her then. I wish I had been at the same place, been the same age . . . but, such are the cruelties of circumstance. At least I did meet her, finally, in 1979, when we were both at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I believe she was in the very first class I ever took there.

I tried to speak to her after that first class . . . and she was off like a shot. Out the door. Across the campus. And away. I’m not sure she slowed down until she was in her apartment with the door bolted.

It took me two years to land a date.

But that’s a story for another day. When I have a lot more time.


*

We married in 1982.

For some reason, she’s stayed with me ever since. Again, I’m a little mystified as to why. Her friends are confused as well. Sometimes they ask, meaning it as a joke, “Did you have to marry him?”

We’ve also heard the same thing from some of my co-workers, but not as a joke. “How do you stand it?” asked the woman who did package ads sales at one magazine, during the Christmas party.

Then, the woman realized what she had said, and quickly tried to make it funny. “I mean, you know, not that it would be bad or anything . . .”

Except, of course, sometimes it really IS bad. I have not, as they say, been able to give her the moon and the stars. I have not always been as kind, as strong, as gentle, as …well, anything…as I should have been for her.

Yet she has remained.


*

I do not deserve her.

But that, of course, does not mean I will let her get away.

*

One last story. This one about me rather than her.

Several years ago, I was at one of the magazines for which I worked. I found myself in a conversation with a number of other editors. These included a woman of about my own age, also married, and with a bawdy sense of humor.

Listening to us, from across the room, was another woman. She was quite young, though older than her years. She had been the daughter of a Yugoslavian diplomat. She had traveled the world as a child, and worked now in the U.S., while her country split into warring parts.

Anyway, the older woman asked me about my future plans. If I intended to retire and so on. It wasn’t a serious conversation, so I made a joke of it. I said I hoped to be a decadent old bastard.

She laughed and said, “With the young mistress?”

No, I replied, if Martha found out, she’d kill me. The older woman laughed.

But, then, from the other corner of the room, came the low, musical, slightly accented voice of the Yugoslav.

“Men,” she said, “always say that when they don’t want to admit they love their wives.”

Ah…


*

She was right.

Very well.

I shall admit it here.

I do. Enormously.

More than words, here or anywhere, can even begin to say.


*

Onward and upward.









Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker