Today Alice’s students will draw the pheasants. Alice unlocks the props closet in Bantam Hall on the downtown campus and sees the two taxidermied pheasants on a high shelf, exactly where she left them last semester. The pheasants were purchased by the Department of Art thirty-seven years ago, Alice’s first year teaching at Juniper College. She places her tote bag on the floor and opens the brown stepladder in front of the metal shelf with the pheasants on top. She will ask the girls in her 10:00 a.m. Intermediate Drawing class to render the pheasants in pastel, but she knows the drawings will turn out poorly because these girls insist on buying the absolute cheapest supplies, garbage with too much filler and hardly any pigment. Bad supplies make bad art. Last week she overheard a student boasting about paying only two dollars for a box of pastels at Walmart. It is incomprehensible that these students think Walmart is an acceptable place to buy art supplies. One goes to Walmart to buy toothpaste and bug spray and cereal and kitty litter, not to buy the supplies with which you create art. But the girls in her classes don’t actually aspire to be real artists; Alice knows they think her class is just a requirement to suffer through so they can get their degrees and get jobs.
“Oh, ma’am, ma’am, let me,” calls a voice, and Alice turns and sees a boy with a wispy, struggling goatee rushing toward her.
“I’m perfectly capable,” Alice says, and she puts one foot on the bottom step of the stepladder. Why is he calling her “ma’am”? Isn’t it obvious she’s a professor and owns a key to the closet? The boy looks at her as if she’s an old vagrant who snuck into the building to pilfer supplies but, really, who would want to steal driftwood or cow skulls or cloth flowers? These items might be useful in a still life but not in real life.
“I’d better do it,” says the boy as he walks toward her. “I’m Hutch. I’m the keeper of the props closet.”
“The keeper of the props closet?” Alice cannot keep the incredulity out of her voice. Is he being paid to guard a locked closet containing objects of little to no monetary value? The closet is a large space—about half the size of a classroom—but it houses nothing any thief would want.
“It’s my campus job,” Hutch says, and Alice thinks this boy actually looks proud of himself. But it’s not a necessary job, at least when professors in the department take the time to instruct their students about respecting the objects that inhabit the closet. But a quick glance at the mess here—the tablecloths bunched up in a corner, the upended armless mannequin, the brass tea kettle dented all over—tells Alice no one has talked to students about carefully putting things back in their proper spots after a still life has been disassembled.
“I didn’t realize there was such a job,” Alice says. She is uncomfortable now, with one foot still propped on the step, so she brings the other foot up.
“Oh, no, no, ma’am, I’ll do it. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” The boy has the nerve to reach out and touch her elbow, trying to guide her down the step as if she is a feeble blind person. Alice swats away his hand.
“Do you know how many years I’ve been fetching these birds from this shelf? And the other birds too?” Alice asks, sweeping her hand toward the Canada goose, and the pileated woodpecker mounted to a tree stump, and the crow with the cracked beak, and the sleepy looking mallard.
“All the more reason to take a break and let me handle it,” says Hutch. He scrambles up the ladder and Alice has a view of his hairy, knobby knees peeking out from baggy denim shorts. Her students have taught her that denim shorts are called jorts, a portmanteau of jeans and shorts, and they’ve said that only the nerdiest boys wear jorts. Her students are all at the Ilium campus, the old, battered campus where no one wants to teach anymore, especially not anyone in the Department of Art. The downtown campus is modern and bright, and the Department of Art there is housed in a newly constructed building featuring studio classrooms with excellent natural light pouring in from large windows, a darkroom for traditional photography, a lab with Macs with enormous screens for digital work, and even a 3-D printer. The real art degree, the serious sixty-credit major, is housed at the downtown campus.
“Wow,” says Hutch, looking around at the top of the shelf, “it’s dusty up here.”
“Is dusting under the purview of the keeper of the props closet?”
“I could dust, I guess,” Hutch says, and Alice wonders if he knows the meaning of the word “purview.” Hutch descends the ladder and says, “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before. Are you new?”
Alice laughs. She is most certainly not new. She’s just never been assigned any classes at the downtown campus, so the students here think she’s a stranger. She only shows up at the downtown campus for department meetings and to pick up objects from the props closet. The girls at the Ilium campus—the women’s-only campus of Juniper, the original campus before the expansion downtown—are working toward art therapy degrees, not fine arts degrees. They are dabblers, who think art therapy is the easiest degree they can earn to get them a stable, good-paying job. Alice would love to teach the serious artists who are studying at the downtown campus, but what can Alice do when her younger colleagues are having gallery shows in New York City and she has done little—beyond throwing herself into her teaching—over her long career at Juniper? Is it her fault that the kind of figurative painting she does has gone out of vogue? And there was more than a decade in her thirties and forties when Alice cared for her ailing mother when she hadn’t produced any paintings at all. After her mother passed, it hadn’t seemed terribly important for Alice to continue her own artistic practice. She’d already earned tenure and could wallow at the rank of associate professor for the rest of her career.
“Can I bring the turkeys to your classroom for you?” asks Hutch, who is standing on the top step of the ladder, a pheasant under each arm. If he is not careful, he will crush their long tail feathers.
“They’re pheasants.”
“Right, okay,” the boy says, but he seems unbothered by being corrected. This is likely because he is used to being either wrong or uninformed. “Can I bring the peasants to your classroom for you?” He descends the ladder and stands next to Alice.
She will not bother to educate Hutch on the difference between pheasants and peasants. “Are you an art student?” Alice asks.
The boy nods. “I’m a junior. Photography major.”
Of course he is. Alice has always found the photography majors to be the most undisciplined; they are the ones who claim they don’t need to learn to draw because it’s not a required skill for photographers. What they don’t understand is that learning to draw trains the hands and, more importantly, the eyes of any artist. Alice thinks photographers are only a small step above the art therapy majors. When the school first introduced art therapy as a major fifteen years ago, Alice told herself art therapy was a noble profession. She thought of her mother, of the dementia in her last years, and she wondered if perhaps an art therapist might have helped bring her some peace. When the art therapy degree was first approved by Juniper, Alice soothed herself about no longer teaching actual fine arts majors by telling herself the art therapy students were doing something good in the world. But lately the girls have seemed uninterested in helping, and mostly concerned with getting jobs after graduation.
“So where should I bring them?” asks Hutch, jutting his chin toward one of the pheasants he’s holding.
“My classroom isn’t on this campus,” says Alice. “I teach on the Ilium campus.”
“Really?” says Hutch, as if she’s just said something stunning, as if she’s told him Rembrandt is still alive. Scratch that—this boy likely hasn’t heard of Rembrandt.
“Yes, really.”
“Don’t you have a props closet there?”
Alice doesn’t say anything. Of course they don’t have a props closet in Ilium. The one and only remaining art classroom on the Ilium campus is on the fourth floor of Wilty Hall, the building where the theater program is housed. There is an expansive props closet for the theater students, filled with costumes and objects that can be used in the dismal plays the students produce, but there is no props closet for the art therapy students, which is why Alice must raid the downtown props closet every time she wants to set up a still life. There is no elevator in Wilty Hall, so Alice must transport any props she needs to Ilium, haul them up four flights of stairs, and then lug them back downstairs and back to the downtown campus when she is done. Because Alice never learned to drive, she must take the ugly green campus-to-campus bus with the taxidermied animals as seatmates.
“Maybe I can talk to Professor Crews and see if he can give some of the department’s budget for props to the Ilium campus,” Hutch says, as if he’s some benevolent benefactor, as if Alice has never asked for more funding for supplies, as if she’s never asked if she can use some of the space currently allocated to the Theater Department for an art props closet at the Ilium campus. As if a boy in jorts who is struggling to grow facial hair can convince the department chair of what Alice has not been able to convince him to do. But she knows no funds will be allotted for supplies for her classes; she, like the Ilium campus and her art therapy students, is an afterthought in the department. She knows everyone is just waiting for her to retire. But then who will teach the girls in Ilium?
Alice hefts her tote bag up over one shoulder then says, “Please give me the pheasants,” and Hutch hesitantly hands them over. She gets the pheasants settled under both of her arms by grabbing the wooden bases to which they are attached. She is careful not to crush any feathers. Both of these pheasants are males, with bright green heads, white collars around their necks, and coppery feathers on their bodies. They are beautiful birds.
“Do you just, like, put them in your trunk?” Hutch asks.
“I take the Green Bus.”
“No!” Hutch says, his eyes wide. “Don’t you drive?”
“I do not.”
Hutch closes the stepladder and leans it back against the wall. “I thought everyone drove here.”
“I have transported the pheasants on the bus plenty of times over the years to no ill effect.”
“You need help getting them to the bus?” Hutch says. The expression on his face tells Alice he doesn’t believe she can possibly make her way downstairs and to the corner where the bus will pick her up.
“I am just fine, thank you,” Alice says. Then she realizes both of her hands are full and she will have to put the pheasants on the ground in order to lock the closet. The boy might as well put himself to some use. “Don’t forget to lock the closet when you depart,” she yells as she walks down the hall.
Alice always sits in the same seat on the bus, the one in the first row that’s closest to the door. Years ago, when she first started teaching at Juniper, there was a handsome and pleasant bus driver named Paul, and he would converse with her during the twenty-minute drive. After a year Paul got a better-paying job driving buses for the city, and now the shuttle drivers are a rotating crew of young men who enjoy speeding through yellow lights and stomping on the brakes every time they have to stop.
Today Alice settles one pheasant on her lap and places the other on the seat next to her. She holds the base of the pheasant on the seat with her left hand so the bird will not topple down the aisle. Girls trudge onto the bus, and most of them look half asleep. Alice has heard the dorms in Ilium are not as nice as the downtown dorms, and this must be why most students insist on living downtown, even though doing so requires them to get up earlier than they deem humane in order to catch the shuttle for morning classes on the Ilium campus.
“Professor!” says Susanna Horton, as she climbs the steps of the bus. She stops in front of Alice’s seat and points to the oversized men’s undershirt she’s wearing. In sloppy letters written in Sharpie are the words CAPILLARY PULL. Then there’s a blob of marker beneath the words, the pigment pulling out in all directions, a demonstration of the concept of how ink naturally moves on a surface. “Capillary pull” is a term Alice taught her Intermediate Drawing class last week. She is befuddled as to why Susanna is wearing the term scribbled on an undershirt.
“It’s the name of my band!” Susanna says. “We’ve been trying to figure out a band name for months, and when you said ‘capillary pull’ on Thursday I was like, ‘Yes!’ Jenna and Kimmy from class are also in the band.”
“What instrument do you play?” Alice asks.
“Well,” says Susanna, “the thing is we don’t, really. We went to a bunch of thrift stores and got instruments, but we don’t actually know how to play them.”
“If you don’t play instruments, how are you a band?”
“We’re going for something atonal, so we don’t actually want to learn how to play. We just make noise. I got a trombone. It’s kind of rusted, but that doesn’t really matter.”
Alice has tried very, very hard to teach her students that skill is built through practice, that no one—well, maybe Picasso—springs from the womb as a highly skilled artist, and that hard work and constant practice lead to improvement. But it seems all her talking is for naught because these girls think they can actually be a band but not know how to play instruments. Maybe this is analogous to all the people who call themselves artists who don’t make the effort to learn perspective or composition or color theory. If you say you’re something nowadays, if you proclaim it loudly enough, well, perhaps you can convince the world that you are, in fact, the thing you say you are.
“I guess I should sit down,” says Susanna, glancing back at the line of girls that has formed behind her. “But I just wanted to say thank you for naming our band.”
Alice most certainly did not name Susanna’s band, but she nods at Susanna and doesn’t argue. Susanna shuffles to a seat near the rear of the bus, and Alice watches the rest of the students straggle onto the bus. As always, half of them are still wearing pajamas, as if these are acceptable clothes in which to attend class. Alice wonders what they think of her, riding the bus back and forth between downtown, where she lives, and the Ilium campus. She wonders if they feel sorry for her because she does not drive, but, really, it’s possible to get by without driving if you live within walking distance of a supermarket and a drugstore and a library. Where else does Alice really need to go? When she was much younger, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
