She Spits

by Cori Jones

FWD: V_R_Hale8019@GCCC.edu

TO: Batman4u@GCCC.edu

From: Margery Dargan, APPPLAC <Margery_Dargan>

Subj.: WELCOME STUDENTS and Kissing the Sceptre

Cc: Les Exoo <Lester_Exoo>; J_R_Cafferty <J_R_Cafferty>

Date: August 28, 2005

Ms. Hale:

This is the seventh time I have e-mailed you since May. You have not responded.

Currently you have the highest GPA in your class. I am considering you for the position of Ambassador to Excellence, which will offer you the opportunity for leadership and to represent our excellent college by appearing in a video. You must come to my office later today at 3:30 to discuss this. I am forwarding you the e-mail I send welcoming students when they enter the College which gives the College’s history. Please review the facts in this e-mail before coming to the APPPLAC office, which is in Joker Hall 212.

Margery Dargan,Ph.D. (Comparative Literature), Rutgers

APPPLAC

________________________________________________

All of you who enter Gotham County Community College this week will already be thinking ahead to Graduation Day. When that day arrives, signifying your own achievement of excellence, you must kiss the bat-winged sceptre at the December ceremony when you are handed your diploma by myself, J.R. Cafferty (The Vice-President of Everything), President Exoo, or the elected faculty speaker. Kissing the sceptre is one of Gotham’s most sacred traditions. In order to understand this act, it is very important that you become acquainted with the College’s history.

Founded in 1969, the college’s physical space was the gift of Mrs. Barbara Cyzygy, who owned packets of undeveloped land in Hunterdon County, Morris County, Somerset County, and the great city of Newark. Mrs. Cygyzy had inherited the land from her husband, Josef Cgyzyy, who revealed his complete collection of Batman comics to his wife a few days before he died, tragically, of old age. Mr. Cyzyyyyy told his wife that he envisioned a “community college on a hill,” founded in honor of his hero. So we have the name “Gotham County Community College,” even though New Jersey contains no county by that name. In Mr. C’s vision, Batman would always look down upon the college community and smile on the land where his literature and legacy would be preserved forever. You will notice this legacy as you go to your classes in one of two classroom (and office) buildings, Robin Hall and Joker Hall. Mr. C’s collection of comic books sits in the college archives. It is very important that you refer to them as graphic novels, NEVER comic books. These graphic novels are not available for library loan, but you must sign into the archives and show that you have viewed the collection at least once before you graduate. Every time you cross the quad between Joker and Robin, you will see the six-foot statue of Batman. We ask that you not litter the statue, wrap it in toilet paper, or use cell phones within ten feet of it.

About me: as you can see by the above title, I am APPPLAC. This stands for the leadership office of Assessor of Postmodern Pedagogical Processes and Learning Acquisition Coordination. I care about you. I want to ensure that the pedagogical processes here have the correct postmodern perspective and are free of biases of race, class, and gender. You must no longer think of yourselves as “male” and “female.” You must learn that gender is a social construct and that we are all on a continuum of male and female.

If your learning acquisition is suboptimal, or if you cannot form your learning modules into rubrics, stop by my office in Joker 212 and discuss the situation with me. I will investigate all complaints.

Remember! YOU are entering a college which inspires EXCELLENCE. You must uphold that excellence. WELCOME!!!! Have a great semester.

Margery Dargan, Ph.D. (Comparative Literature), Rutgers

APPPLAC

PART TWO, HANGING WASP

GOTHAM COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE: SEPTEMBER 2005

CHAPTER TWO: She Spits

“Where’s Excellence?” Vinca shouts for the third time. She’s staring at Dargan’s cheap plywood door, which is locked up tight and has a wood stain like a vulva in the middle. She steps back and takes a Cadbury’s Bar out of her purse. Grabs two napkins from her pocket. And this APPPLAC nut ordered her to come over on August 28th? She figured she’d wait till today, till after Gilman’s class, but then the bitch marches right into the class and disrupts everything and tries to order her around. She bites the bar in half and chews, then holds a napkin against her mouth. Half down--or not down--depending on you look at it; half to go. “Hey,” she bangs on the door. “Excellence, remember? I haven’t got all day!”

No response. She shoves the other half into her mouth and chews it quickly. Another napkin, more spitting, a toss into the convenient trash can next to the vulva.

Vinca starts giggling. She’s had no breakfast and two venti lattés. Her mouth feels full of chocolate, so she leans over and spits repeatedly into the can. A raunchy thought: maybe Dargan’s in there with some guy, maybe President Exoo. Maybe he’s stopped by for a quick fuck and they’ve scattered all her papers and are going at it on top of her desk while she’s out here spitting chocolate. She presses her ear against the plywood door, which is pretty thin. Mumble. You should have investigated the woman last summer, immediately after it happened. Mumble mumble. Well, I can’t help it if that one gave you no information in July! Mumble mumble mumble.

What was that last mumble? What did she say just now? Vinca pounds on the door with both fists. “Come on. Yo! Excellence! Let’s get this over with!”

“I beg your pardon?” Dargan’s heels click and her voice chirps as she opens the door.

“Excellence. I mean, where is it?” Vinca shoves past her and plops down on a plastic chair that faces Dargan’s desk. “When you’re an ambassador to something, it means, like, a country. So I’m wondering: where are you going to send me? India? England? Guinea –Bissau?”

Dargan gives her a dirty look. “You do not have the position. I told you in my e-mail that I am considering you. This could go either way.” Dargan walks behind her desk and sits down primly. She opens her purse and sneaks her cell phone into it, which Vinca hasn’t seen till now. She hasn’t seen such a a weird outfit in a long time. A tight leopard-print skirt with red flames that comes to just above her knees, and a red tee shirt that doesn’t match the red in the skirt. And that hair! Butch-buzz dyed blue. Fugly. Gah.

“Are you listening? If I choose you, you’ll be an ambassador to the excellence that comes from the pedagogical processes being generated by APPPLAC.”

“Huh?”

“And you’ll discuss those processes on a video.” She holds up a manila folder. “I have your file right here.”

“My file?”

“Your transcript, notes from instructors, complaints. Your complete file.”

Vinca raises her voice. “What are you, CIA? Is it legal for you to have that stuff?” So Dargan kept her waiting for this bureaucratic bullshit because she wanted to yak on her cell phone? This conversation is heading down the toilet fast, Vinca can tell. She glances around the room. This is somebody’s office? It’s the most depressing office she’s seen here, not like Professor Snow’s, with his collection of globes going back to 1896 and his huge map of worldwide immigration patterns that covers one wall. And his plush elephant, which stands beside his desk, smiling. It was four feet tall, he told her last spring. Dargan’s place is cement-block dreary. There’s nothing on the walls except two framed photos, black-and-white, on the wall to her right.

“As an administrator. I have the right to look at any documents I want.” Dargan gives her a saccharine smile. “Now, I need to know two things. First, have you received an education free of biases of race, class, and gender here? And second, will you be wearing that Godawful wig?”

Probably no harm in playing along for a bit. “No. And yes.”

“You have been subjected to biases?”

“You mean biases against wigs?”

“No. We’re talking about biases of race, class, and gender.”

“We are?” She thinks on this. “Before I went to Harvard I had a black boyfriend . . .”

“An African-American boyfriend,” Dargan interrupts.

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, I hung out with him when he sold, um, stuff –if you catch my drift---to cancer patients at Dana Farber. That’s in Boston. I didn’t go with him when he sold it to the brothers over in Roxbury. That’s where he lived. That’s in Boston, too. Me, I lived on Brattle Street. In Cambridge. So, see, he came from a different race and class than me. So there you have your race and your class.” If Dargan’s gonna keep speaking bullshit, Vinca will continue to lapse into third-grade logic.

Dargan leans forward, nodding. What does this idiot think Vinca will tell her? About having sex with an African-American? About how one day, and the next day after that, Jerome didn’t show up at Dana Farber and his beeper suddenly was no longer in service? Dargan wants to hear Vinca’s two theories: that he’s in jail, or he’s dead? No way.

“And I’m a girl and he’s a boy. So there’s your gender. In a nutshell.” Logic For Dummies. Oh, yeah.

Dargan draws back and sits up straight in her chair. It’s a wooden chair, Vinca notices. No Staples Office Specials in this office. Pure straight–backed wood, like something out of a museum on the Freedom Trail.

“That’s not how we look at gender here, Ms. Hale. It’s not merely a matter of male and female. I’m surprised that you haven’t noticed that in your classrooms.” “I did notice. How could I miss it? Gender on a continuum, gender as a social construct, blah blah blah. That’s practically all anybody talks about, at least in the English Department.”

“Well, there’s no better place to get your learning acquisition than the English Department,” Dargan beams. “I myself am a member of that department.”

Vinca frowns. “I thought you were AFLAC or APPPLAC or whatever.”

“I used to teach in the English Department. Now I’m proud to say I am a postmodern administrator who favors leadership.”

“Oh, huh?” Be honest, Mum has taught her. “I don’t think it’s such a great department, ma’am.”

“You called me ma’am. Don’t lower yourself to a subaltern status.” Her voice is stern.

Vinca stretches her legs. “My mother’s people were Virginians. So I have sir and ma’am stuck in half my genes. And that subaltern stuff? See, that right there is the whole problem in the English department, far as I can see. Party line: racism, classism, heterosexism bad. Anyone would have to be from another planet to think racism and classism are good. But those professors act like everybody but them either thinks all these things are okay or they don’t know they even exist.” She yawns, putting her hand over her mouth just in time. “And in either case, the professors are all too smug for my taste. And they try to ram their point of view or ideology or whatever down your throat to make sure you learn they’re bad.”

Dargan points her finger at her. What is she, a schoolmarm? “Tell me one class you

noticed this pedagogy in.”

“Schenk’s.”

Dargan nods. “But you must know that Harmony Schenk is one of our finest instructors.”

“I disagree.” Vinca snorts. “I took American Lit Two with her. It’s a survey course, right? Post-Civil War and such? Well, she spends the entire course on one book. Some junky book from the Seventies. The Exorcist. Every paper we wrote was on that stupid book.”

“There are opportunities for learning acquisition in that novel.” Her face is almost purple; Vinca knows she’s made her mad. This is getting to be fun, sort of. She hasn’t made enough people mad lately, except for that bloody-nosed creep in Gilman’s class this morning.

“Yeah, well,” Vinca speaks slowly. “She turned this survey course into a feminism festival. Tells us the first day that she’s not going to be afraid to share her personal history with the class and then she goes on a rant about her Glory Days in the 1960s before The Exorcist was published and she burned her bra or something.”

“That was an act of defiant feminist courage, don’t you see?” Now she’s leaning forward again, a faint strychnine smile forming at the corners of her mouth.

“No, and I told her so. I said it was about as feminist as throwing your panties to the Boss.”

Dargan shakes her head. “You are not demonstrating good learning acquisition.”

“Well, tough. You know I was expecting to get some good acquisitive learning or whatever you call it in Professor Gilman’s class today, but you come in and order me into your APPPLAC or AFLAC goose-pen and then waste my time by telling me that gender is not a matter of male and female.” Vinca glares at Dargan.

Dargan clasps her hands and slowly leans forward. She has big hazel eyes, kind of pretty. And the way she’s staring at Vinca right now, Vinca doesn’t know if she’s a schoolmarm or a vamp. But that hair! “I have the right,” Dargan begins. “To come after a student, someone who has the highest GPA in the class, who has a chance to be in a video. A student who did not answer one e-mail I sent all summer.”

“C’mon. Who answers e-mail in the summer?”

“Anyone who is asked to respond to a very important matter.”

“Yeah. Well, sorry.”

“I would think that anyone who’s been exposed to Harvard University would have the good manners to respond. It was an honor.”

“I don’t have manners.” That’s for sure. At least that’s what Mum’s always saying. “Anyway, what was an honor? My going to Harvard?”

“The invitation I extended you to be considered as a student ambassador.”

“Ambassador, huh? Well, it’s clear that I can’t be an ambassador if I can’t go to a place.”

“No. You won’t be going anywhere.”

“Oh. I can’t even go to the East Village?”

“What?”

“Like, Alphabet City. In Manhattan, you know? That’s where a lot of Jersey kiddoes go clubbing.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.”

“That’s for sure.” Actually, Vinca thinks, it isn’t for sure. Dargan may be acting like a bossy prissy bitch, but there’s something in those eyes. Maybe it’s the blue eyeliner that she’s put above the lashes of her lower lid. There’s something wild there. But that blue hair, forget it. It’s more artificial-looking than Vinca’s sapphire wig, which has long dreds that fall to her boobs.

“You will represent GCCC. Did you read the copy of the e-mail I forwarded you about the College’s history and kissing the Sceptre? And the graphic novels in the archives?”

“I glanced at it last year,” Vinca frowns. “You sent it to all the freshmen, right?”

“Correct. And I send it to every student every month.”

“Well, that’s overkill. When students get welcomed twelve times a year and get all that PC gender crap thrown at them, they feel like they’re not welcome. Especially the boys. It feels like you’re scolding them.”

“If you want to be an ambassador, you must read it. You need to review the history of this College and Josef Csygzy’s great vision if you want to show true leadership.”

“Josef Csygzy? As in Barbara Csygzy?”

“Barbara was his wife, yes.”

Vinca chews her pen. “I heard she looked just like Anna Nicole Smith.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Blond. Real booby. Big. Did you know you spelled Csygzy about fourteen different ways in that e-mail?”

“It’s a Polish name,” she says finally.

A Polish name? No biases here. Yeah, right, Vinca thinks. “I heard,” she continues, “that you guys have a budget crisis here. I’m thinking that if I make a video, I could make it real juicy. Take it to the East Village. Really sell it to the Club crowd. My goal or objective or whatever would be to get New Yorkers to go to school here. Charge ‘em out-of-state tuition. Lot of money in out-of-state tuition.”

“Go on.”

“I mean, there’s juicier stuff to play up than old man Csygzy had a farm, ee-yi-ee-yi-oh. Did you know he made Barb dress up in diapers and do a lap-dance while he was reading Batman comics?” She clears her throat. “Excuse me. Graphic novels.”

Margery stares at her dead-on. If she lost forty pounds and changed her stupid hair color, she’d be so absolutely hot.

“Yeah. And on certain nights he’d wear his Batman cape to bed and make her wear a mask.”

“Where did you get this?”

“I heard it.”

“From?”

“Fifi Skrebel.”

Margery makes a face. “Her name is Fidelity.”

She shrugs. “Well, I call her Fifi, and she happens to be my friend. Anyway, a video’s a waste of time unless you get actors to pay Joey and Barb. Great S&M possibilities. I could narrate.”

“No. Tell me more about your learning acquisition.”

“Hey. What’s that mean, anyway?”

“What?”

“Learning acquisition.”

“I am the Dean of APPPLAC. It’s part of my title.”

“Yeah, but it’s so . . .jargony. What does learning acquisition mean, exactly? Like, what professors I’ve had and so forth?”

Dargan smirks. “Let’s start with why you left Harvard. I take it they had nothing to offer you.”

Vinca leans forward. “They had the world to offer me. I left because I spit.”

“What?”

Yeah. And I still spit. Right outside your office, honey. “Never mind. Anyway, most of the professors here are okay.”

“But you implied that Harmony Schenk is not. You questioned the action of bra burning in Professor Schenk’s class. You just admitted that yourself.”

“Well, I disagreed with her point. But you must’ve figured that out at your age.”

“What?”

“About what’s important in feminism.”

Margery sniffs and stares out the window. “And why are you taking Professor Gilman’s course?”

“I felt like it. I like to write.”

“Professor Gilman isn’t a scholar.”

“So?”

“And she’s not a postmodernist.”

“Good.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Geez. No. She’s a writer, and she teaches writing. So she must know something that Schenk doesn’t.”

“What?”

“Well, writing ought to count for something.”

“But it isn’t academic writing.”

“Big fucking deal. There’s too much of that around here.”

“Too much academic writing?”

“Too much phony scholarship. Schenk was always announcing that someone’s giving a paper in the Grand Conference Room. Telling us it would help our grade if we went.”

“It was important for you to go. Did you?”

“Hell, no. I mean, who wants to go hear a paper with a title like ‘My Lesbian: My Self: Rita Mae Brown and the Mirrored Imaginary.’ Or something like that. Anyway, all those gender articles have about fifteen colons in them; that should tell you something. I mean, a colon is a place where a body stores shit.”

“Did you learn that from Robert Cafferty?”

“You mean Joe-Bob? No. I obviously learned it from being in Schenk’s class.”

“I am talking about this impossibly intolerant stance toward the dignity of women that you show.”

Now it’s her turn to lean forward. “Sometimes feminism doesn’t have a lot to do with bra-burning or some feminist professor’s definition of the dignity of women. And by the way, Joe-Bob seems like a nice guy.”

Dargan sighs. “Very well. I’m not going to bother to ask you about your wig.”

“Fine. It’s none of your business anyway.”

“What is my business is why you left Harvard.”

“I told you. I left,” she says slowly, “because I spit.”

“Ms. Hale, is this some game you’re trying to play with me? I’ve asked you why you left Harvard and all you can say is you spit?”

“Chapter and verse.”

Dargan takes off her glasses and leans back in her chair. No makeup, except the eyeliner. Give Vinca ten minutes with some foundation and blush and she could turn Margery Dargan into a juicy belly dancer. If she felt like it.

. “But . . . forget it,” says Dargan. “I want to know how you got from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Gotham.”

“There was this person at Harvard who lived in . . .” Whoa. She’s not about to spill any beans here: not about Ann, not about anything. “Oh, never mind. I got bored.”

“Excuse me?”

“See, I took all these extension courses all over Boston: Harvard, BU, Northeastern, Emerson, all those schools. Then I figured I’d better go back to college for real.”

“Did you have a job at the time? Most of our students have to work as well as go to school. Which makes learning acquisition difficult sometimes.”

Vinca shrugs her shoulders. “Most of the world has to work. I understand that. Like I said, I know that different social classes exist in this country. I’ll be honest here. See, I live with my cousin. I could have just lied and said I was a Jersey resident and paid in-state tuition. I didn’t, because paying extra money is no problem.” She inches her chair a little closer to Dargan. “But if someone was poor and in the same situation as me, I would have lied. Truth is, I’ve never had to work much.”

“What did you do when you did work?” Dargan’s jaw is twitching a little.

“Pole dancing. Over near Chinatown. In Boston.”

Dargan makes a noise through her nose. “And what did you think of that line of work?”

“I quit after a month. These guys kept shoving dollar bills up my crotch.”

“I see.” Dargan picks up a pair of glasses from her desk and wipes them on that hideous skirt. When she puts them on, she looks like Schoolmarm of the Year. “You’re aware, of course, that you have the highest average in your class?”

“Yeah. Cool.”

Dargan’s mouth twitches. “A woman with your GPA doesn’t look like the type of person who would wear a wig or do a job like that.”

Vinca folds her hands and looks down into her lap. When she looks up at Dargan, she knows Dargan can see little bits of tears that she hasn’t had time to blink away. “My wigs’re nobody’s business. Get it?”

“Or condemn bra-burning and feminism in general,” she continues.

“I never condemned no bra-burning.”

“Any bra.” Oh, Mum would love this one. Mum loves anyone who corrects her grammar. Except Dargan looks a little too Irish for Mum’s taste.

“All I said was it was like throwing panties to the Boss.”

“The who?”

Vinca bursts out laughing. “Girl, wake up. What state are we living in? Is this Jersey or what?”

Clearly Dargan doesn’t know The Boss from George Bush. Keeps staring at her like she’s done . . . what, exactly? Shoplifted from Filene’s? Skipped confession? Dargan is beginning to remind her of Mrs. Reilly. But there’s this under-the-surface wildness. Schoolmarm or vamp?

“This has nothing to do with New Jersey,” she answers.

Vinca leans forward. “It has everything to do with New Jersey. Were you born in the USA or what?” She can’t resist that one.

“I am an American citizen,” Dargan announces.

This is going nowhere. Vinca thinks. First she sits out in the hall, collecting gobs of chocolate, and eavesdrops on Dargan’s weird phone conversation, then she comes in to

talk about some video that Dargan supposedly wants her to do, and she’s just ended up in a big fat loop of a conversation that’s starting to turn into a bitch-fight. Can they get to the video? Please, now? She has to move things along. “Look, she says. “I just think there were more important things to do in the Sixties than set fire to some garment you wear on your boobs. I mean, don’t you think all it did was get people to think about boobs? And feminists are always talking about women’s bodies being exploited. You burn a bra, what does it make people think of? Boobs. So it isn’t any different from throwing your panties to The Boss.”

“Why?” Dargan’s practically shouting. Geez.

“Because. You wear panties to cover up an exploited part of the body too. Right? I mean, don’t you?” Her voice trails off.

“I don’t see this discussion as being appropriate for a Women in Literature class.”

“Well,” says Vinca, “it was American Lit., remember? Anyways, the course had a subtext. A hundred reasons why you should hate men or whatever. And me, I like men.”

“We mustn’t forget our role in fighting the binary,” says Dargan.

“The HUH?” One of the photos on the wall shows a country road, slick and liquid and black, winding down a hill covered in snow. The branches of an evergreen are bent down. Heavy snow, Vinca thinks. The kind that leaves a road wet. The other photo shows an empty swimming pool. Maybe someone had just dived into it, because circles of waves reach out from a point just off-center. It must have been taken at dusk; faint moonlight glitters on the waves. Where is the diver? There’s nobody, nothing. The absence of people and the off-center waves make the place look bleak, unbearably lonely.

Kind of like this office, she thinks. But these are quality photos, Vinca can tell. “Nice photos,” she says.

Dargan looks down. “They’re old,” she whispers.

“Great shadow and light. Did you take them?”

Dargan jerks her head in a curt nod.

“Neat. I took a photo class, and I never could get that shadow and light balance. And the darkroom drove me nuts.” Nothing wrong with chatting this one up a bit. “You’re good.”

Dargan’s face looks frozen. “The man you refer to as Joe-Bob said the same thing once. I used to have my own darkroom. . . .” Dargan takes a deep breath.

Whatever. Who cares what Joe-Bob? “Now, what about this position? Ambassador or such? Am I gonna get it?”

Dargan sits up straight. “Oh, no. You certainly are not.”

“Wha. . “

“There are too many black marks on your record.”

Too many shadows? Vinca stands up. “Well, that’s just great. I come over here for nothing.” She turns before she walks through the door. “Don’t forget. I spit.”

When she walks down the hall, she remembers the weird stuff Dargan was saying on her cell phone. What was that last thing she mumbled? Somebody’s husband died of

nerve gas? And the woman should be looked at more carefully because this is not bullshit; this is a serious threat? She has to have heard it wrong.