The Last Gasp of Fall
A few months before I was accused of killing Aaliyah, my biggest worry was Janelle’s mother’s passive-aggressive comments about her moving in with me. She was going on and on with her rhetoric about how New Bedford was dangerous and reminded her of Brazil.
“Just because you were born there doesn’t mean you have to live there,” she said. “That’s why we left Rio.”
When her mother thought of the city, she pictured the crime, the gangs, and the rampant drug use in the community. I couldn’t blame her. I’m sure she read the Whalers Beacon. But I couldn’t help but let her less than subtle comments get under my skin.
With my back to her, I gripped the box of Janelle’s old gymnastics trophies, and I rolled my eyes so hard I almost lost my balance. I tried to hold back from saying something unfiltered, something that would ruin the day for Janelle. Her mother started making coffee at the sink as I walked past her to put the box into the moving truck. When I came back inside, I could no longer help myself.
“You know,” I began, “People on Cape Cod struggle with drugs just as much if not more than in New Bedford.” I didn’t know if that was true, but it at least made her take a step back. The best one-liners always have a hint of truth to them. Janelle was born and raised on Cape Cod, in a little town called Yarmouth, where her parents moved to from Brazil when they were teenagers. They had come to Massachusetts, like so many, to give her a better life. I could see why she might have thought I was taking that away from her.
“Enough, Ethan,” Janelle said under her breath, as she zoomed past me with a box in her hands.
“Did I say something wrong?” I asked. She kept walking.
I might have been wrong. If we’re being truthful here, I didn’t know if that fact about Cape Cod was true. But I did know that HBO produced a documentary about drug use on Cape Cod, and there wasn’t one about New Bedford. Maybe that’s because the addicts on the Cape were mostly young and White. That made for compelling television. Media typically swayed in that direction, aimed to capture the sensational rather than the fundamental truths. Honestly, I hadn’t seen the documentary, but it was a comfortable assumption.
“It’s dangerous, flor,” her mother continued once Janelle was back inside. “What if there’s a break-in? I’ve seen the articles.”
“You can think what you want, but New Bedford is actually where a decent chunk of Moby Dick takes place,” I said. “Melville loved it there. He was able to see the good in it.”
She kept making coffee. I don’t think she knew who Herman Melville was. That’s okay, though. Not everyone knows everything. You can’t get mad at people for what they don’t know.
New Bedford, to me, was like an uncle or a cousin who taught you how to throw a curveball when you were eleven yet committed armed robbery later in life that he’s on trial for. Deep down, you knew he wasn’t a great guy, but you couldn’t help but defend him when you had the opportunity. You presented him as misunderstood because he means something to you, you know? He raised you. He means well, even if he’s a little rough around the edges. Plus, if he’s such a bad person, then what does that make you?
It’s impossible to describe New Bedford without first focusing on the water. The relentless, unforgiving, baptizing water. New Bedford was home to the largest fishing fleet in America, with around five hundred ships employing over forty thousand people. Downtown, fishing vessels bobbed up and down mere yards away from the dock, finding themselves anchored to this place. The smell of ocean water permeated through the cracked wooden walls of dilapidated taverns and old chapels built by sailors from a past age. Fishermen ventured out into the water for weeks on end to catch scallops and pollock, among dozens of other varieties, which always gave the locals sustenance. Some of them never made it back, or they took solace in drugs or alcohol once they returned. It’s not unlike teaching when you think of it that way, venturing out into the unforgiving oceans and drinking ourselves to death at the end of the trip. There’s a metaphor there somewhere. I’m sure of it.
I purchased an apartment in the North End of the city a few years prior. It was a multi-family unit, one apartment sitting on top of the other. Janelle was to move into the bottom unit with me. My brother, Karl, and his roommate, Doug, lived in the upstairs apartment. It was an ideal situation for me, having those I felt closest to living all under the same roof together. On the plus side, Karl and Doug paid me rent, in cash, on the first of every month and I always knew I could find them if they were late.
When I bought the place, it sold to me for $200,000. That’s how you know it was a real piece of shit. Outdated floral wallpaper covered the walls, and the carpets were discolored and worn. The first time I did a walkthrough with my real estate agent (who just happened to be my mother), I counted four portraits and three statues of the Virgin Mary, rosary beads wrapped around each of them. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but it helps paint the picture.
I spent a few months fixing up the place before moving in. I guess it was my own small way of making the city a little nicer; my way of making a tangible impact I struggled to create in my classroom every day. I discovered hardwood underneath the fuzzy shag carpet, ripped off the wallpaper, did a deep clean of the rooms, and threw a new paint job on the interior and exterior. After a few years, the value doubled. It became the place Janelle and I would start our lives together, if I could ever get her out of her mother’s house.
I knew there was no winning my verbal tug-of-war with Janelle’s mother. We could go back and forth for the entirety of the afternoon, but she had her perspective, and I had mine. I knew she would only be happy with Janelle nearby, but that’s not how life is supposed to go. Kids are supposed to be raised, cared for, and provided by their parents, until one day, when they are finally let go to find their own way. When I thought about my students, the ones that walked doe-eyed into my classroom every September, it felt as if very few of them had that luxury. Most of them were lucky to have stability, guidance, somebody who cared about them.
Each year, a new batch of 6th graders would enter my classroom, and in that moment, I became the one responsible for teaching them how to read literature, how to think critically, and how to dream about the possibilities of their futures. But each year, I received the same message about a different kid. The guidance team warned us to “be wary of so and so. He’s had a tough upbringing. Dad is incarcerated and Mom is in and out of the picture, so he lives with his grandmother. If there are any issues, reach out to her.” I didn’t include a name because it applied to far too many of my students to be specific.
It was a cold Sunday the day Janelle left her family home to move in with me. One of those days that is technically springtime but feels more like the last gasp of fall, scratching and clawing and trying to remain relevant. In Massachusetts, there is no rhyme or reason as to whether it is going to be sixty degrees or twenty degrees in March, but we were unlucky enough to pick the latter. Dark clouds covered the sky, and the cold wind gave warning of an incoming storm. We finished loading the U-Haul, waved goodbye to her mother, then drove down 1-95 West to the city. I took a deep exhale when we pulled out of her driveway.
“You didn’t have to engage with her,” Janelle said.
“What?”
“My mom,” she said. “She’s just upset I’m moving out. You could have just let her vent.”
Janelle was an only child. I probably should have considered that. If I’d only been able to read those types of situations better, I might have never gotten into the whole mess in the first place.
“I guess I got defensive. I’ll apologize next time I see her.”
“I hope so,” she said. “Let just get this stuff inside.”
“It looks like it’s going to pour,” I said. “See that black cloud over there? It’s moving our way. We should probably wait until tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to wait, Ethan. I want to move my stuff in today. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. It’s just a little rain. If anything, it will cool us off after all this lifting.”
“Then we do it today,” I said. “Rain never killed anyone.”
That was the thing about Janelle. She could see the good in everything. She was the type of person who would have gotten deeply into religion if her parents ever took her to a church. That was because when she walked into a chapel or laid eyes on a congregation, she would have seen it as a beautiful community, inspiring hope. She would have seen all the smiles on their faces, all the love they had for each other, and she would have wanted to be a part of that love. My parents used to take me to church as a kid, and I always saw it as a place of manipulation and greed. I guess that was the difference between her and I. It’s the way we saw things, our perspective. I think that’s why I needed her so much in my life. Counterbalance is important.
We unloaded in the rain.
When the job was finished, and the apartment I once knew had transformed into a mecca of candles and home goods, I sat down at my computer to prepare for the upcoming week. I used to try not to work much at home, but it was unavoidable. It’s just the way things were for teachers. Imagine if you were a server and got off your shift, and your boss said, “Thanks for the hard work today. While you’re home tonight, just make sure you wash the silverware and wrap them in napkins. If not, you’ll be screwed tomorrow.” That’s what being a teacher was like. Lots of silverware got washed at home.
I checked Clever, a teacher portal used in modern-day education, and noticed I had sixty-seven missed messages. They were all from one student, Henry Baptista. He was a smart kid, but extremely needy in the classroom. We had a lot of those types. The kid that clearly wasn’t getting enough attention at home and craved it when they walked into our building. I’ve transcribed some of his messages below:
—mr. callahan i need help it is an emergensy
—were are you?
—why arent you ansering?
—im being abusd
—i was watching the celtics game and my mom told me to do the dishes and i told her i was watching the celtics game and she said i needed to do the dishes but i told her i didn’t want to and then she yelled at me
—why arent you ansering i told you it was an emergensy
—my moms boyfrend yelled at me and told me i have to do the dishes
—hes so mean to me i think hes going to beat me up
—jason tatum has 24 points and 7 rebounds
—hes not my dad but he pretands hes my dad but hes not and he is mean to me
—im being abusd i cant believe you dont care about me
—fuck you!
I responded as quickly as I could type. In my response, I told Henry that his mother wanted him to help around the house. I stressed the importance of growth, respect, and listening to adults, especially to his mother. And I told him that because he was getting older, he needed to take on more responsibility. I made no mention of the boyfriend. It was not worth putting that in writing. I didn’t make enough money to comment on things like that.
Henry responded within the next ten seconds.
—wow i guess u dont caer about me bcuz u didnt even listen
My messages continued to add up over the course of the night. Every ten or fifteen minutes, I’d reopen Clever to see how many more there were. First, there were fourteen, then twenty, then thirty. The last time I checked, it was up to forty-five. I didn’t open them. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I could see the frustration in Janelle’s eyes. Me, on the first night in the apartment together, hunched over the computer, eyes never leaving the screen. Her quiet frustrations rang loudly in my mind, so I shut the laptop and asked her if she was interested in splitting a bottle of wine. I went to the liquor store, and bought a bottle of red cabernet and a twelve-pack of Coors Light. We drank the bottle together, and after it was gone, I had a few beers, so I’d be drunk enough to fall asleep when it was time to. Janelle went in an hour or so before I did. She was snoring by the time I made my way underneath the covers.
When I got to my classroom the following morning, there were 105 unread messages in my inbox. I brought my computer into Mr. Buckley’s office. He was the assistant principal of sixth grade at the time—a half-decent guy. More importantly, he knew Henry well. But like most administrators, he had much more on his plate than he could handle. When I walked through his office door, he took a quick glance at me and locked back into his laptop.
“What can I do for you?” he said in an exasperated voice. It wasn’t even 7:45 a.m.
“I’d just like to report some troubling messages I received last night from Henry. He says that he’s being abused because his mother and her boyfriend want him to do chores around the house.”
“Have you noticed any bruises?”
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“All right, Ethan. Let’s be honest. Henry has multiple pairs of Jordans, and he always shows up to school with his hair braided. He’s not being abused. Just tell him he needs to listen to his mother.” He never looked up from his computer.
“I did, and he didn’t take it well. He said I didn’t care about him.”
“You know how sixth graders are. I’ll talk to him later. Right now, I have to finish assigning coverages. There are seventeen teacher absences today. Can you believe that? Happy Monday to me. I’ll be working on this for a while, but I’ll grab him when I can. Is there anything else you need?”
“That’s it,” I said. He wanted me out of there.
“Have a great day,” he added flatly.
He continued working on his computer. I left wondering if there was more to the story, more investigation that should be done, but I had students coming into my room in fifteen minutes, so I couldn’t linger on Henry’s home life any longer. The kids had to learn how to read.
My focus was on Eleven, a short story by Sandra Cisneros in which the main character has an awful birthday because her teacher makes her take ownership of an ugly sweater left behind in the classroom closet for months. We taught it every year because it’s relatable as our students were also eleven. Get it? The nuance isn’t very subtle there, like in most of the stories we taught. Some of our students didn’t own a sweater though. In fact, I knew a few of them who would have been happy if their teacher gave them a sweater, regardless of how ugly or smelly it was. Besides, if it were up to me, our short stories unit would have been exclusively Ernest Hemingway.
(I know, the White male wants to teach Hemingway and not Cisneros. Sorry if you’re judging me. What an awful person I must be, right?)
I didn’t pick the stories we read in class. In fact, I don’t think there are many public educators in America who still have that luxury. Our entire curriculum came from ReadNow, a program our school district spent millions of dollars on to make up for their lack of dedicated professionals. You see, with ReadNow, each story, poem, question, essay, and classroom activity were all predetermined, and we had to teach them in the order that the program gave them to us. Every day was mapped out, one short story after the other, the same rehearsed speech adding to the monotony of each day. Don’t get me wrong. I understood why they bought it. It was so that even the shitty teachers—of which there were many—could still produce decent test scores. But this approach took all the life out of teaching, if you want to know the truth. It was only a matter of time until they brought the robots in.
Because of ReadNow, our curriculum across all three grade levels did not read a single book from cover to cover. “Studies show that students improve their reading ability significantly more with shorter texts,” they’d say. Administrators love studies, but I’m not even sure if that’s a real one. I’ve never seen it. All I know for sure is that they didn’t read novels on any of our standardized tests, and that’s what we were assessed upon, so that’s most likely the reason we didn’t teach any in English class. You can judge me all you want for the cynicism, but it felt like we were going backward. I think we forgot why people read. Forgot the power of books.
Henry did not come to school that Monday. I didn’t see much of him after the messages were sent. He told Mr. Buckley that his teachers did not care about him and his education was suffering for it, so the administration moved him into another part of the building with a different team of teachers. I knew the grass wasn’t greener on the other side, and his reading would suffer from the change, but I had ninety-eight other kids to worry about. I lost track of Henry after he switched teams, so I don’t know what happened to him.
I’m sorry if that’s disappointing. A lot of stories around here don’t have satisfactory endings. If that’s something you don’t vibe with, you don’t have to read the book. It’s really okay. Because this isn’t a story about tying things up in a neat little bow. It’s about unraveling that bow, one knot at a time, and discovering what’s left after everything falls apart.
