I’ll Be Seeing You
written by: Andrena Zawinski
A group of students approached me as I walked through the door, begging me to get rid of Madeline, a student they claimed monopolizes the class with wild antics, so much so that many dropped out. One took me aside to say the last two instructors each quit after one week, and she hoped I’d stay on, adding, “Be careful. She’s in a girl gang in Berkeley.”
And stay I did. I looked forward to taking over for my Department Chair in this creative writing course for poetry, fiction, and drama, a favorite of mine, with the confidence of having been published widely in all three genres. I also had my share of quirky students, so not much phased me; well, maybe this one did.
Madeline, Maddy, made an impression quickly. The first in-class writing assignment, an icebreaker, was to write a seven-word story paying special attention to the power of concision and what potential the story could hold, to share them in small groups, to present one or two from each group to the class—usually a simple, unthreatening, and productive exercise.
Less than two minutes into the first leg of the fifteen-minute assignment, a young woman dressed in what I came to call clown chic, bolted from her chair and blurted out: “Teach! Teach! I got it. I’m reading it now.” It was Maddy.
No easy task to reign her in, I insisted she wait it out until other students finished; but wanting nothing to do with participating in a group, she stormed out, throwing her balled up paper into the trashcan and slamming the door behind her, reminding me of the adage of “cutting off the nose to spite the face.”
She did return as presentations were being made of selected seven-word stories, took her seat, then yelled, “Here’s mine: Someone’s gonna kill the creative writing teacher” as she looked down the imaginary shape of a gun she made with her hand and pointed it my way.
Maddy stopped attending, and I dropped her from my roll, but it didn’t end there. In the Student Union coffee line, she’d stand behind me, breathing down my neck. At the faculty mailboxes in the Administration Building lobby, she’d stand close, looking over my shoulder. At my bicycle, as I loaded up the saddlebags with papers and books, she scowled when I asked, “Can I help you?” “Do you want something?” “Are you okay?” The last straw was when I was sitting on the stoop of my nearby apartment, when she biked by flipping the bird.
The Dean presented a plan to let her back in class after her social worker made a case for a second chance, since she got Maddy and her mother into a group to help break their drug abuse. The choice was simple, I told him: “One of us has to go, and it shouldn’t be me.” And it was not. And she was banned from returning to campus. And the problem was solved. Well, almost.
After giving a poetry reading at the Art House on the Oakland Berkeley border, I joined two friends for pints of Guinness and an Irish music jam at the nearby Starry Plough. Just as I was marveling at the wall mural starting off with a James Connolly quote: “No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression,” a young woman caught my eye who was perched in the alcove off from our table and staring at me. I mimed playing a fiddle, pointed at her, then made walking sign with my hands toward the stage and nodding my head upward as if to ask whether she’d be performing, to which she shook her head vigorously left to right then mimed the same to me, to which I laughed and said out loud: “Oh, no, not me.”
Suddenly, something clicked. I turned to my friends and asked, “Remember that student, Maddy, I told you about who stalked me?” then went on to say, “I think she’s here,” as she disappeared into the thickening crowd, and we shrugged it off as an unlikely coincidence now over a year later.
They left to get the car, as I stayed behind to settle our tab. Outside on the corner stood the young woman, whom I barely recognized as Maddy without her facial rings, green and pink hair, and wildly mismatched clothing. Unmistakeable, however, was the forefinger she pointed at me with thumb up, looking as if down a barrel at me as she said: “See you around, Teach.”
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