A Pot of Rice

It was raining hard when she got back to the apartment. Stepping over the letters on the hallway floor, she headed for the bathroom and sat fully clothed on the toilet. A mouldy smell from the cold walls tickled her nose; she sneezed sharply and shivered under the green sweater, sodden as her hair. The subway stop to the apartment door was a good fifteen-minute walk, and even running pell-mell she was soaked. She wrenched the matted wool over her head. The pink shirt beneath was also wet except, for some reason, around the buttons. She tugged at the vinyl boots. They were too small to begin with, and now the wet calluses stung, rubbed raw by the thudding sprint on cracked pavements.

She closed her eyes, and Steve Katz’s plump face wobbled into view. Pinned to the grey sheet behind her lids, his pink adolescent head trembled, prematurely bald. She wished she could like him more. He was one of the few students to show some curiosity about her, and, if that large round body were expressive of feeling, she could almost believe he had a crush on her.

How her neck was aching!

The bus was half an hour late, and the waiting passengers were backed up around the block. She stood the whole ride, mashed in the center of the bus between two silky blonde girls and a bulky woman in a nursing uniform. They had all stared hard at her and leaned their bodies away because her clothes were already quite wet by the time the bus pulled in. That half-hour wait meant catching the Lex at Forty-second Street at 4:50 p.m.—the precise moment, it seemed to her, that thousands of offices, banks, stores, hospitals, schools, libraries, businesses, luncheonettes, and other containers of people burst open their doors and leaked their smelly, twitchy, tight-jawed, black-edged-under-fingernails contents into the avenues and underground tunnels. All the way home she had tried to shrink herself as small as the figure in a music box, and now her body hurt.

Only the sad students liked her: the fat or short or stammering. She didn’t care to think of them as she rode the subway. These students liked anyone who paused to smile. They stopped to smile themselves, perhaps because they had nothing better to do. Steve Katz, Bertha Willard. They hung around her, walked her to class from the office. Perhaps she never showed them she had anything better to do, though she often had nothing to say and nothing to share except the understanding that they were all missing something.

A student like Robert Healey said nothing at all, yet he took up a whole corner of the classroom, his legs tightly encased in greasy blue dungarees and sprawled wide and his handsome torso positioned boldly to face the open door. She didn’t dare throw him a question, for it would have fallen on his thrust-out groin and twitched shamefully there.

The papers he handed in, always on time, were dull. She wrote back, “You can do much better work than this. C+,” but he didn’t care and never came up to her to complain. He was like Susan Krammer, Jack O’Hagen, Donna D’Agostino—almost all the students in her two sections of Introduction to Composition. They came to class on time and waited for the end of the hour before leaving—thank God for middle-class conformity—but their faces brooded above the open textbooks like those of hardened young criminals planning a jailbreak.

She felt exactly the same way. Finally stripped naked, Su Yu dried her damp arms and chest with a rough, faded purple towel. Teach in Queens, live in Brooklyn—she hadn’t bargained for the jolting two-hour commute each way or for the dreary piles of compositions to be graded each week. It was like slogging through endless mudslides, the composted heaps of a city’s garbage, while fluttering the Girl Guides bandana.

Robert Healey sprawled in a corner of her mind, relentlessly...