I dismissed this comment. Things had gone so well for me for so long that I
didn't see I was standing right next to him on a dividing line between how you
imagine your life will turn out and how it actually does. After spending my
whole grown-up life shaking hands, making promises, and smiling at the right
people in order to be liked and to get ahead, to stay ahead and never slip, I
was a man who had forgotten how lucky he was.
It was early March of 1992, I was forty-one, married, with three children under
seven years old and a fourth due in June. We were living an unhurried life in
upstate New York, in a small town in a big house on easy street where we paid
our way each month without much sweat.
This was pretty much the same safe and privileged life I had known from the
time I left behind the rattrap apartments of my childhood in Bangor, Maine, for
a classy private college on a football scholarship and then graduate school on
a big fat fellowship I don't remember even being grateful for. I was in the
passing lane, leaving behind my uncles, grandfathers, and cousins who lived out
their lives as low-wage, no-ambition, Lawrence Welk on Saturday nights, two
weeks off a year, classic American working stiffs. They were nice enough guys
but guys who were going nowhere. As soon as I was old enough to see how the
world worked I began working hard to get enough velocity in my own life to
escape theirs like a man fleeing a fire.
I never looked back. I went from one promising job to the next. Even when I had
a good job I was always looking for a better one, and sometimes I would take
job interviews just for the chance to see what I was worth to a stranger and to
listen to him tell me how marvelous I was. I had quit a good job at the
University of Maine, where I was completely happy, to take a job in the
Department of English at Colgate University for more money than the combined
income of both of my uncles when they retired. At the time there was that goofy
commercial on television where a handsome Irishman goes dashing across an
impossibly green field, smiling like a politician because he's so happy with
his new deodorant soap. It could have been filmed on the Colgate University
campus, where the lawns and the playing fields were as lush and green as
Ireland when we arrived in late-August 1989. My students affectionately called
the place Camp Colgate and the Colgate Country Club, and told me that they had
chosen this over other schools because of the university's ski slopes, which I
could see from my office window, or the squash courts and beautiful indoor
tennis courts, or the award-winning eighteen-hole golf course and the
trap-shooting range that were a short bike ride from campus, or because the
university was ranked academically among the top twenty in the country for
getting students into law school, or because Colgate had been celebrated as one
of the nation's best party schools, based upon its per capita consumption of
alcohol.
My own reason for choosing Colgate was no more substantial: it was right up
there with the Ivy League schools, maybe not quite an Ivy League school, but
definitely just one step, one job away. There was also a long list of
irresistible perks that included several thousand dollars to order any books I
wished for the library; a retreat on Lake Saranac where we could spend weekends
as a family and have our meals prepared for us; a low-interest loan for the
purchase of a house in town a few blocks from campus; a gift of three grand for
a summer project, plus paid student research assistants if I needed them;
generous health, dental, and life insurance plans; a marvelous retirement
pension plan that would multiply like cells dividing; free tuition for my wife
to take courses toward her master's in education and for my four children to
attend any college in America; a discount in the campus bookstore; a new
Macintosh computer system; a paid sabbatical leave after three years of
teaching; and most of all, time. Five weeks off at Christmas, ten days off
during spring break, three months in the summer. This amounted to roughly
eighteen weeks of paid vacation per year. Plus an additional ten weeks if you
added up my two free days each work week of the academic year.
It was a dream. My full teaching load was nine hours a week in the classroom
first semester, six the second. There had never been a violent crime in town.
We bought a six-bedroom house on a tree-lined street a few blocks from campus
and the elementary school. In contrast to the nonacademic residents of town,
most of whom earned little more than the minimum wage, my faculty salary
enabled us to live like royalty, and Colleen was able to fulfill her
long-standing desire to stay at home with our children.
That first winter it snowed every day in December but two, and the campus was
transformed into a wonderland. We pulled the kids all over town on their sleds,
and got them up on skis. Colleen taught them her fine technique for making
angels in the snow. Once when I turned my head from a department meeting on the
third floor of Lawrence Hall to glance out the window, I saw my whole family
down in the quad putting the finishing touches on a giant snowman. It made me
feel that our life was charmed.
I remember the nights best. They were so magnificently cold and bright that
Colleen and I often stood outside looking up at the stars before we went to
bed. The only tension between us in those days was the result of my wife's
honesty. A true Maine woman, she felt no need to try and impress anyone. I was
in the faculty lounge schmoozing the feminists in the department one morning
when Colleen appeared with the kids. They got to talking and when one of my
colleagues related how she had gone straight back to work after her baby was
born because she didn't feature spending her days at home changing diapers,
Colleen coolly announced that on the worst days there were maybe ten diapers
and each took no longer than a minute and a half to change. The feminists
looked at her like she was quaint or exotic, and when we were alone I cautioned
Colleen that someday I might need letters of recommendation from these women in
order to grab a better job at a much better school.
The best part about the job by far was my students. They were so pleasant and
eager to please that I went the extra mile, taking on more of them as my
advisees than anyone else in the department, inviting them to our house for
dinner and movies, and teaching literature with a no-holds-barred passion that
made my classes some of the most popular on campus. That wasn't hard, really,
because these were the days in academia when most professors droned on about
preposterous literary theories while their students fought bravely against
sleep. I was well paid for my efforts and nominated every spring for "Professor
of the Year" by the Student Honor Society, which sent me beautiful letters
extolling my devotion to bringing literature to life for students.
In fact I received another one of those letters in March of 1992, my third
year, the same day the dean of faculty wrote to inform me that I was being
fired.
The terms of my dismissal were as fair as anyone could ask for: I would be
allowed to finish the rest of my third year and to return for a fourth with a
pay raise, full benefits, and an additional stipend of three thousand dollars
if I wished to serve as advisor to the debate club. Meanwhile the dean would
recommend me highly to other universities, with an official letter that said I
was being dismissed simply because the English department was already top-heavy
with tenured professors.
In all the jobs I had held across the years, from the first, picking vegetables
when I was thirteen, I had never been fired. My first reaction was that some
mistake had been made. They got the wrong guy. They don't know that Colleen has
just finished making curtains for the house and painting the kids' rooms and
we've just drained our savings account of its last nine thousand dollars to
replace the cast iron pipes with copper and to strip the basement of asbestos.
They got the wrong guy. They don't know that we've got a new baby coming, and
that my father has a brain tumor that is taking over his life.
I sat on our back porch and read the letter several times before I walked to
campus, climbed the hill to the dean of faculty's office, and waited there
until he could see me. I had enough self-confidence then-or maybe it was
arrogance or just a long history of successes-to think that I would be able to
fix things. I'd say the perfect thing. I'd tell him about all my achievements.
I'd make the right impression and the decision would be recanted. It would be
like nothing had ever happened.
I watched the secretaries answering telephones and typing into their computers.
Okay, I thought, this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to explain very calmly
to the Dean that I'm the only professor in the English department who teaches a
freshman seminar, the only one who teaches an upper-level general education
course every term, the only one who volunteers to teach multiple sections of
the required survey course, and that no one has taken on more advisees or
sponsored more independent studies than I have. The dean doesn't know me
personally so I have to make him see who I am. With three published books to my
credit, a stunning graduate school record, and letters of generous praise in my
dossier, all I have to do is press the pedal down a little harder.
He was gracious and in a hurry. While he was promising that he would write me
glorious letters saying how I was loved by my students and respected by my
colleagues, I was watching him glance at the big clock on the wall, and I was
thinking, Wait a second, pal, you're not going to give me the bum's rush here.
We're going to take a long time, maybe the rest of the afternoon, because I've
got a lot of wonderful things to tell you about myself and about the work I've
done here while you were playing computer golf in your office.
I laid it out for him, but I could tell by the way his smile never changed that
I was already floating off his screen. I heard my voice climbing a little too
high as I explained to him that my father was ill and that we had a new baby
coming. When at last he put his hand out for me to shake, I was short of
breath.
His pasted-on smile. My embarrassment. "I'm sorry," he said, showing me to the
door.
That night I read The Littlest Angel to Nell and Erin at bedtime. When they
conked out I sat down on the floor by their nightlight and tried to figure out
the finances of losing my job. With monthly expenses of just over two thousand
dollars, I figured that we would be able to save around $140 dollars each month
from my remaining paychecks. That was seventeen monthly paychecks until I would
be cut off on August 1, 1993. Two thousand three hundred eighty dollars. But
before my last check I would have to reimburse Colgate the five thousand
dollars they had loaned me for a down payment on the house. So, aside from
whatever it was going to cost to move, we were going to be short by almost
three thousand.
I waited until Colleen was asleep that night and then I walked from room to
room with a flashlight, taking inventory of our possessions and deciding what
we could sell and for how much. The washer and dryer were worth four hundred.
How Colleen had loved having a proper laundry room, with its wide window taking
in the afternoon sun. She folded laundry every day at the long low shelf below
this window, though I couldn't remember ever seeing her do it. In the dining
room there was the table I had
built out of rough boards. It was worth maybe twenty bucks now that it was
permanently stained from the kids doing their oil paintings there with Colleen.
In the playroom another table worth another twenty bucks. I shined the
flashlight up at a corner of the ceiling that I had patched with sheetrock; I
had done dozens of jobs like that in the house; there wasn't any job I wouldn't
tackle so long as it fit my one criterion-I had to be able to begin the job and
complete it in a single day because, after all, I was a busy man with more
important things to do. Along the windowsills Colleen had lined up the
seedlings she was growing with the kids in anticipation of a garden by summer.
I knelt down end reed the little name tags of each plant scrawled in the girls'
handwriting. I thought how long it must have taken them to write the names,
making mistakes, erasing, starting over again, their mother waiting patiently
and encouraging them until the names were right. In the kitchen I examined the
refrigerator, moving aside the magnetic letters and checking for scratches. Two
hundred dollars, maybe. In the guest room was a bureau made of cherry that had
to be worth four hundred. It had belonged to my father when he was a young man,
and Colleen had already identified it as more than a piece of furniture; it was
something she wanted to pass on to our children. In the living room there were
two couches, each worth a hundred and fifty. Two wing chairs that had to be
worth at least seventy-five. The one near the woodstove was where Colleen spent
a winter breast-feeding Jack. I saw her unbuttoning her blouse for him and
cupping his blond head in one hand while she fed him. Upstairs she was in each
room, in the mobiles swaying above the kids' beds, and the needlepoint murals
hanging on the walls, and the stenciled bureaus. I followed the bright shaft of
light through the darkness, feeling more and more like a burglar, a stranger in
this house. Colleen and the kids had lived in these rooms that l had merely
passed through.
I figured somewhere around fourteen hundred. And maybe if we lived very
carefully we could Cut our monthly miscellaneous expenses from four hundred to
two hundred. That would mean another $3,400. So, after repaying Colgate the
five thousand, we might have two thousand left by the time I was cut off.
The next day I went to the human resources office and found out that I could
cash in my pension for $16,800, minus $3,200 in tax penalties. I added this
amount of $13,600 to our projected savings of $2,000: $15,600. It didn't look
bad at all. I had seventeen more months on Colgate's payroll, and by the last
month we would have $15,600 in an emergency fund. Then I would begin a new job
with a new monthly income kicking in. So as long as we could sell our house for
as much as we'd paid for it, there was really nothing to worry about.
But when it came to telling Colleen that I had been fired, I never could seem
to find the right time, or the right room in our house. There was always her
with her lovely pregnant belly and her faith in me, and then there was me with
my pink slip.
The night I finally told her, it was good and cold, cold enough to skate on the
backyard rink I had built. When I went upstairs to our bedroom, I found Colleen
asleep with a book in her hand. I knelt down and leaned close enough to her
face to feel her breath. In the late stages of her pregnancies I used to love
to lift up her nightgown while she slept and watch the baby rolling around in
her belly. Tonight each time the baby moved, Colleen's eyelids fluttered. I sat
there for a long time before I kissed her cheek to awaken her.
"Did someone throw up?" she asked me.
"Let's go skating," I said.
"What time is it?"
"Late," I said. "Middle of the night."
She closed her eyes and waved goodbye to me.
"I'll make hot chocolate?"
She sighed.
"If I carry you downstairs, will you skate with me?"
"If you try to carry me downstairs, you'll never skate again," she said.
By the time we reached the ice I was lost in her pretty face just as I had been
the first time I saw her ten years before. Under starlight we did our Olympic
skit of the two Russian ice dancers, Nikita and Vladimir, drunk on vodka, that
always made the kids laugh. I twirled her around in the cone of white light
from the spotlight. I was looking at her and feeling her presence so deep
inside me it was as if there were no space between where I ended and she began.
What I liked best about moments like this was how different we seemed from the
rest of humanity. Everyone else in the world was asleep in their boring lives,
their clothes laid out on a chair for the next day, which would not distinguish
itself from the day before. Not us. We were up and on the move. "Here's the
news, beautiful," I finally said. "I got fired."
She turned and faced me and asked if I was telling her the truth When I heard
the disappointment in her voice it surprised me because across the years she
had been the adventurous one in our marriage, right from the start, when we
eloped in England and snuck into a first class train compartment and made love
beneath our overcoats. She had always loved new places. In 1987, when we had
saved a little money for a down payment on a house, she decided we should use
it to go to Ireland for the winter. We had a newborn baby and an
eighteen-month-old and we were flying across the Atlantic in the dark of night,
still undecided whether we would get off the plane in Shannon or Dublin.
I felt her pull her hand out of mine. The spell was broken and she glided away
from me. "Now we'll be free to try out for the winter Olympics," I called to
her.
At first she didn't say anything. Then she skated back and told me how her
father had been laid off once when she was a little girl; he was so ashamed he
pretended to go to work each day, and for a couple of months he fooled the
family.
"Your father's like all the men I grew up around," I told her. "To them, all
the great enterprises of life-political elections, religion, even love
itself-had no meaning unless they were holding down a job.
She turned away and skated back into the darkness. I was wondering if she was
going to mark this as the first bad thing that had happened to us in the ten
years since we'd met, years she had spent happily with her healthy, smiling
babies in tow, while the screaming siren in the dead of night was always for
someone else.
"Who needs this place?" I called to her. I skated to her side and took her hand
again. I told her there was plenty of time for me to find another job. I pulled
her close. "Where do you want to go next?" I asked. She rested her head on my
shoulder and didn't say anything. I pressed my face against her hair and looked
up through the branches of a tree at a constellation of stars that I couldn't
name. I asked her which one it was and she told me. Colleen had tried hard to
get me to pay attention to such things, to learn the types of flowers and trees
in the places where we had lived together so I could teach our children. I had
always heard her and never complied with her efforts to get me to live in the
present tense, the way small children do, rather than how I had always lived,
inside my vast intentions and vague ideas, which, to her, were only dull abstractions when set alongside something as fine as the
starlight above us. I don't know. Blame it on my escape velocity, I guess. I
was moving too fast to pay much attention.
"I know it's only a job to you," she said thoughtfully.
Then I knew what it was-for me this place was just another stop on the long arc
of achievement and acquisition, but Colleen had made a home here.
I told her everything would be all right. "I'm not worried at all," I said.
"It's just that the kids are so happy here," she said. She looked back at our
house. "Erin and Nell in their school. Jack learned to walk here . . . and with
the new baby coming . . . I don't know, I guess I just didn't want to have to
think about moving."
"We don't have to think about it for a whole year," I told her again.
"And I thought you were happy here too," she said softly. "You seemed happy."
"I have been happy," I said. "And I'll be happy someplace else. But that part
is way down the road. You don't have to think about it now."
"I'll think about it every day," she said. And this, I recognize now, was the
difference between us; I would put my head down and plow right through the next
year and then move on without ever looking back even to write a letter to
anyone I'd known here. But from now on, each time Colleen was with her friends
she would think about having to leave them.
When she reached the porch I called to her. "What I meant is, it's no big deal,
Colleen. I lost a job, that's all. I'll find a better one."
When she opened the back door, light from the kitchen fell onto the snowbanks.
I watched her stop in the doorway and I thought she was going to wait there for
me or tell me to come up to bed. But instead, she stood with her head down for
just a moment in the box of yellow light and then went inside and closed the
door.
Recalling that night, I see her hesitating there in the lighted doorway of the
house where she would wake in the night to feed the new baby, sitting at the
front windows and looking across the darkened rooftops of houses where people
she cared about lived.
I stayed outside and skated by myself for a while. Maybe some people lay awake
at night taking stock of themselves, measuring the sum of what they possess in
this world, of all that they have worked hard to attain and how easily they
might lose it. Not me. Not then, anyway.Excerpted from: Snyder, Don J., The Cliff Walk: A Memior of a Job Lsot and a Life Found, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1997, 0-316-80308-1