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It was the third week of class, mid-September, still sticky and convertible top-down and windows-clean, and the room was packed with young men and young women each of whom had put on too much deodorant that morning. Dr. Balboa drew a circle on the board and peered at it from over the frame of his eyeglasses. He smiled a half-smile and turned to the class.
Silence, except for intermittent drilling from the building next door and someone’s stomach rumbling.
“What is it?” Dr. Balboa said.
“A circle,” said Marnie.
“A circle. Interesting, but no. Recall we are here to probe literature, Marnie. I’m sorry.”
The circle was of standard-issue yellow chalk on recently-scrubbed slate gray, nearly two feet in diameter, and just an inch shy of being completely closed.
“An orange,” said Eva who was surprisingly ugly considering that her sister, who had taken the same course the previous year, was gorgeous.
Dr. Balboa turned and stared at the circle and entered one of his usual poses, one hand propped up on his hip and the other half-shielding his eyes as if the chalkboard were the sun.
“A gate to hell,” blurted Scott.
“Better,” replied Dr. Balboa.
“A hymen,” exclaimed someone from the back.
“Hymen. Nice. Go on.”
Sandra opened her mouth halfway but nothing came out.
“Go on, Sandra. You have my attention.”
Sandra had held Dr. Balboa’s attention from the first day of class. She was long-torsoed, blond, big-eyed, and boring. Doll-like, in short. But somewhat like a certain doll Dr. Balboa’s older sister had lugged around until she was almost ten. He had always wanted to wring that little doll’s neck. Her name was Barbie something.
“Well,” said Sandra, “there’s no pubic hair, so we can assume she’s a virgin.”
“You can't know that,” said Charlie.
“Okay, okay. Let her run with it a bit,” Dr. Balboa said.
“We can assume she’s a virgin as well,” continued Sandra, “because we can’t see her eyes while we’re—you know—screwing her.”
“For that matter,” Dr. Balboa interjected, “we can’t even see her face. What do you make of that?”
The room was silent except for the sweating.
“Her head’s turned, obviously,” said David.
“Right, and what’s she looking at?”
“The alarm clock,” said Sandra.
“No,” Dr. Balboa said. He paced the front of the room, stopping to pat the pencil sharpener which had been used only once that he could remember in his six-year tenure at the college. It was a small private college and he always taught in the same two, adjacent classrooms.
“She’s looking out the window,” said Scott.
“Close,” Dr. Balboa said, looked at the chalkboard, holding the moment in his mind when he, as an eight-year-old, had drowned his sister’s doll in the family dog’s water bowl. Then he turned again to his students, “Quite close.”
“She’s looking through her bedroom window and into the bathroom window of the apartment next door.”
“Yes!” Dr. Balboa said, swiveling on his heel, pointing to Rachel.
Another silence amid a buzz of drilling this time.
“And?” His finger was still hanging in the air aimed in Rachel’s direction, though his head was surveying the room. “Specifics,” he said.
Someone in the back accidentally knocked a full paper cup of coffee on the floor. A few students clamored shit, and someone hurried out of the room for the women’s bathroom where there were neither paper towels nor toilet tissue, just a hand-dryer which no one ever used. The student looked at the hand-dryer for a few long seconds and then rushed out of the bathroom again, remembering some napkins in the glove box of her car parked illegally in staff lot B.
The coffee meanwhile had been wiped up by another student who’d take out a ratty gym towel from his duffel bag.
“She’s looking into the bathroom window and her eyes land on….” Rachel paused, sniffed her nose in the air like a Beagle thought David, and then said: “The sky-blue soap dish in the shower.”
“But is there a bar of soap in it?” Dr. Balboa said.
“No,” said David.
“No,” said Rachel.
“No,” said Scott.
Dr. Balboa nodded his head slightly. “Good, good.” And turned toward the board again.
A small silence.
His students surmised that Dr. Balboa was in deep contemplation, but all he could think about, in fact, was that goddamn Barbie.
“And then she…she—“ began David, but he was cut off by Dr. Balboa who let out a brief, if explosive, high-pitched scream, his back still to the class.
Like a dog’s yelp, thought Rachel.
Like was that my car horn, thought the woman who’d spilled her coffee and was now running through lot B, napkins in hand.
Like a pimple popping, thought Scott.
Like what am I doing here, thought Charlie.
Dr. Balboa turned back around and faced the class. He whispered: “What was that?”
This time there was hardly a moment’s silence.
“The girl came,” Sandra said.
“Yes, she did,” said Dr. Balboa, “I think you’re right, she did.” And he returned to the chalkboard and he drew two small circles above the first one. Turning, he said, “But did she enjoy it?”
Everyone thought the two small circles looked remarkably like eyes, but nobody said so.
Nobody said so, that is, until the woman with the napkins came back into the room, stopped and looked at the board and said, “Why is that person screaming?”
Dr. Balboa half-turned toward her and said, “She’s not screaming, she’s singing.”
The woman walked up to the chalkboard, took a napkin and drew three vertical lines down the big circle. She then looked at Dr. Balboa, with what he took as a genuine sweetness.
“Very nice. Good. Teeth. She’s smiling,” he said.
“No,” the woman said, “those are my tears.”
Mark Yakich is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (National Poetry Series, Penguin 2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo 2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin 2008). He is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. Mark divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen.
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