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96 CHARLES BAXTER UNDOINGS: AN ESSAY IN THREE PARTS Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. —Judith Butler, Undoing Gender Part One W hen I was in my twenties, I had a friend who was overweight. He wasn’t, as we say now, morbidly obese, and he didn’t look like those people wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops you sometimes see waddling toward you, sideways, down the center aisle of the airplane before collapsing into the seat next to you. To employ a very old word that no one uses much anymore, my friend could have been described as plump. He had been a lonely, studious kid from a small town, and he was the first graduate of his high school ever to go on to the University of Michigan and earn a degree. He had majored in classics, and in his office he had a small picture of a statue, that of Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, on his back, out of the burning city of Troy. My friend loved to talk about the Aeneid and the Odyssey; he loved to talk about music and about politics—he was an old-time progressive who was alarmed by the rise of Ronald Reagan, whose last name he always pronounced “Ray Gun,” as if the former actor were a weapon sent from outer space to help out the rich. My friend ran for a seat on the school board in our city and won; he fought to improve classroom conditions and to lower the teacher-to-student ratio. When my wife and I were married, he and his wife gave us a set of sturdy china plates and salad bowls as wedding presents. We used those plates every day. In those days he and I were both teaching under conditions that could be described as difficult. We labored under a load of nine courses per year, many of them composition classes, and those of us who needed more money sometimes taught extra courses in the university’s adult education night school. This was in Detroit. We both typically had some very smart and some very poor students sitting in the same classrooms. In one 97 Baxter 97 class, I had a student who turned in an essay that she had written using a Magic Marker. It had not been an ironic gesture on her part. When I asked her about it, she said, “You didn’t tell us that we had to use pens.” One spring afternoon, my friend and I were about to enter a faculty meeting in an auditorium. He told me he was going to the men’s room first, and, out in the hallway, in front of several of our colleagues, I called out to him, “Okay, I’ll save you two seats.” He looked at me, and I have never forgotten that look. To this day I don’t know why I said such a thing to him. I suppose I thought I was being funny at his expense, but at that moment I was really no better than a grade-school child mocking a fat boy in his class. This incident happened about thirty-five years ago, but every time I think about it, I still wince. When I wince, I think: That’s very odd, the staying power of shame. That was not the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life, not by a long shot, but it reminds me that the kind and generous citizen I imagine myself to be in my vainer moments is everywhere surrounded in my character by other impulses that have to be carefully monitored. My friend, who actually was kind and generous, probably forgave me, but our friendship cooled anyway. From that day on, he found excuses not to ride to work with me in a carpool we shared. He went off to his life, and I went off to mine. What I said to him was in its small way unforgivable, given the circumstances of our friendship. You might say that it wasn’t a big deal, but I think it was...

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