Bathrobes and Slippers

She didn’t know what a parable was for a long time. Then she learned. And waited…

She was so anxious and lost. It felt like she knew where she was, but there were too many paths and pitfalls. Something could always go wrong, even when a person was trying to do the right thing.

It might have had something to do with the old nightmare she kept having. The never ending nightmare whose meaning any Psych 101 student could figure out: fear of failure. Except. Except she had not been a failure, at least not what the nightmares were always about: Teaching. Or trying to.

Don’t stop reading. Think about it: most people don’t spend their lives teaching, in an academic environment, if they don’t love it in some way, if they don’t thrive on it. Maybe need it, too. Perhaps it’s the ‘need it’ part we need to consider. She needed to consider.

She had been disappointed by the way the day had gone, but decided to go to bed early with a good book, get up and start a new day. Except. Except that horrible nightmare had returned in all its obvious symbolism. She was inadequate in some way. She had failed. She usually failed after all, didn’t she?

No, she didn’t, but she had no way of knowing or seeing that because she was very bad at reading people. She couldn’t even read herself, didn’t know her facial expressions or hand gestures gave her away. She seemed to have mismanaged a couple of meetings with people today. Why couldn’t she do that properly? Like an intelligent person? Like an adult?

The fact that the day hadn’t gone well had churned up something very painful: the images of a failed university career. Of a professor who had climbed painfully up the rungs to enter the elite 16 per cent of her rank who were women. (She’d had no idea.) Of a professor who had received good evaluations from students and had large classes.

Of a professor who had unpleasant things scribbled on her door and more than once. Things that were not only unfair, but also incorrect. 

Who was accused of doing things she didn’t do, and of not doing things she had quite carefully taken care of.

Who sometimes talked and nobody said a word, just stared out the window at the lifeless mall on the dying campus. (Later, her words would come back to haunt her, stolen and repackaged as someone else’s or distorted.)

The sources of repeated nightmares.

She had been brought up to respect authority; they had to be right, the people she worked with. Intelligent, all with degrees, experience. She would just try harder.

No need to belabor the point. She had always survived, but Authority always was running amok in her head. It had to be stopped. Sadly, that only happened when she retired, which she did twenty years before she was eligible to do so. Don’t ask how, but she worked it out. When she was finally out the door, she gave a sigh of relief. She would finally be able to sleep the night through.

Except. Except the ‘failure, you’re a failure’ syndrome, created by evil academic beings, had not been stopped from walking out the door with her. Every time she ran into a challenging situation, her double, the academic failure, emerged from the crypt. The double was never properly dressed and in fact was often only partially attired, in a bathrobe and slippers. The double wandered posthumously around the campus, having misplaced her classroom. The double had no syllabus and did not know what the textbook was. The double was a dumbbell. 

Haha. The double was her real self, the faculty member who didn’t play the game properly and deserved any punishment she got. Had kidded herself into thinking she belonged, essentially making a fool of herself.

It wasn’t funny. She who had loved teaching had actually been a failure? Was that possible? Had she been a fake, never known her field?

No, that wasn’t it at all. She knew that, but in her field, which was contemporary comparative literature, the voices of the critics and editors were the Authority. She couldn’t brush away the memories of the evaluations, in formal letters as well as e-mails, and realized the truth. She would have to live with being a forgotten colleague, except…

She might not be able to delete all the negative elements from over the years but she could rewrite them. Rewrite them, yes. Which she did. She did, because she knew about some things at least, and could have fun with the project. There was a reason she had a life that revolved around literature.

Never underestimate those two words: Fun. Project.

After the last nightmare, she awoke determined. Not certain whether she preferred to write out her initial ideas in longhand, or to start typing immediately, she jotted down a few thoughts using her favorite fountain pen and favorite ink, which was expensive and called rotten seaweed. (The name seemed so appropriate.) She soon was watching the ideas flow down the screen. And more.

Suddenly a whole new space had opened up. It was new and impossible. No, she knew it was possible. It was in her hands now. In her fingertips. Going into her computer, which meant cyberspace. 

First of all, the people. Unavoidable. The ones made of steel and cement, but never of stone. The fluff ones, made of plastic and tin, bent out of shape. The ones who aimed to kill, for different reasons. The ones who taught Romantic literature and public administration. The ones who studied other cultures because they were open to and loved other cultures. Who were lying to themselves. Who never wrote or read a thing.

These people were not ridiculed by her as she kept writing. Why should they be? They were too far gone. She put clown faces on them all instead. She walked by them, feeling only pity, reining in her arrogance. She still couldn’t help adjusting features and garments so they began to resemble populations Dorothy and Toto might have found along the yellow brick road. Nobody would ever take them seriously again.

Second, the system. Promoting competition and getting good grades. She created a new system where grades were unimportant now weren’t worth anything. Nothing mattered in the classroom except curiosity and creativity. A whole new system of evaluation had to be instituted, and everyone loved it because, well basically, everyone got an A if they did what the syllabus for a course said. It wasn’t hard, but it sure separated the children from the adults. Also, professors who were bad at their jobs would be fired. No more covering up for them.

Then she began to tell all the stories. They were all sordid stories, too. Not pretty. Not worth recounting, other than to say that in them were all the vices, all the defects and weaknesses, all the shortcomings possible in human beings. It seemed like some sort of depraved kingdom and probably was. People pairing up with other people, politically or sexually, or any other way. Pairings nobody would ever expect could happen. Pairings of the most comical sort imaginable. 

Secret couplings. Except. Except she knew the secrets of everybody, so there were no secrets. Maybe she had problems reading faces and body language, but she knew their inner details because she could read other things like what they said and the things they read. What committees they were on. Who got promoted and why. She could read threads. She knew what ties different people together. She had sources.

And she proceeded to expose it all: the secret rendezvous, the secret fundings, the secret pacts made at off-campus sites, the ways grants were obtained. She knew where everyone had been, with whom, for how long and how much. 

She was not stupid, however. The university in her book was renamed, set in a different state, maybe a different decade. The only thing real was the reality behind it all. The one they would recognize, because it was their story, down to the very last detail, date, dollars spent. They knew she knew. For that they had to give her credit.

The novel was a huge success. They all waited for the interview where she’d reveal that the plot wasn’t fiction at all, that it was all a true story. They were afraid, and why not? They had no idea what she meant to do with her book that was an x-ray of a college campus in a college town where they all worked in a big, overly-happy family with huge closets full of skeletons. The story seemed completely unconnected to anything in the author’s experience while at her own university, but if she gave away any clues, if she talked…

She never gave that interview. They (her characters?) became increasingly nervous and started to stalk her, threatening her like they’d never been able to do when forced to scribble threats on her door in secret. They came to the conclusion that she needed to disappear, and they stalked her more and more, but she was ready and one by one, the police hauled them off to jail. None could testify against her, because who gets extremely angry about a paedophile in another part of the country and says, She wrote this about me?” Nobody, of course.

Once all the appropriate people were in jail, she began to feel that she had finally been successful. She had become the Authority and she had accomplished her goal by being good in her discipline of English literature. By doing a good job at what they had tried to deny her, forcing her back into a childhood upbringing of humility and unworthiness, especially for the working class. She had found the way to freedom and they, the way to incarceration. She was a good teacher after all. Not a bad writer, either.

If that doesn’t sound like a tale of self-empowerment, nothing does.