We’re Naked Underneath Our Clothes

A WRITING CLASSROOM is an intimate space, and so before I tell you about this night, years ago, when I was still what might be classified as a young professor, a fresh transplant to Indiana soil from the wilds of the Pacific Northwest via the red clay of Alabama, and a mother to a seven-month-old baby who took most of his nutrition from my body—before I bare all—I need to tell you something about what I was wearing. I’m sorry, but I do.

Between my voracious boy and the lack of maternity leave, I was shedding pounds like a calving glacier, dipping below my pre-pregnancy weight and still melting. Naturally, there was no time for clothes shopping, but this was a night class, three hours away from the baby, so I’d decided to dress up, albeit in ill-fitting clothes. I chose a substantial bra to harness breasts two letters further along in the alphabet song than they’d ever been before; a snuggish long-sleeved V-neck brown top; a blue and tan rayon skirt, sort of slippy, over caramel tights; and the pièce de résistance, super snazzy riding boots I’d ordered the previous year but hadn’t been able to pull over my swollen calves. The boots were stepping out of the house for their very first time, and I may have been humming Nancy Sinatra to myself as I strode from the parking lot to my building, feeling like a real grown-up in actual clothes—and boots. To my knowledge, I didn’t have a drop of spit-up or drool or pee on my person.

I wish I could tell you that what happened once I got to the classroom was one of those theatrical, innovative writing lessons wherein a well-prepared pedagogue stages a conflict in the classroom and afterwards leads an illuminating discussion on eyewitness and memory. If I had any sense of propriety or self-protection, I would attempt now to recast the humiliating scene as such—but I would be lying. Despite my smart attire, I was insecure about everything and mad about most everything else.

For example, if I wasn’t still fat, did I look saggy and soft? But if I was saggy and soft, was that anyone’s goddamned business? Did I not have the right to be a mother in the academy? A post-partum, nursing mother in a real woman’s body, pumping out milk and words and wisdom?

Was I smart enough? Did I belong here? Was I an impostor?

I had been doing a lot of thinking about breasts.

Also, I was tired.

This was only our second meeting of the semester, so my students and I were virtual strangers. Many months of limited social contact had diminished my confidence in having anything much to say beyond well-enunciated consonant sounds and color words, but I was, I told myself, a professor, and these boots were made for walkin’. So, in I walked.

INTRODUCTION TO Creative Nonfiction was held that semester on the ground level of the English Department building, a brick monstrosity boasting an entire first floor with no windows, which could serve as a tornado shelter. The effect was bunker-like. Strips of fluorescent lights glared down on the young, pink faces of the twenty or so would-be essayists who, prior to our first class meeting, had never heard the term essay without the descriptor “five-paragraph.”

In the name of Socratic dialogue, I instructed the students to push their desks to the edges of the room, and after they compliantly screeched and clawed the desks?), the result was a horseshoe of smug or scared or bored faces all staring at me, waiting to see if I had anything to offer, anything at all, that might alleviate their self-consciousness, fear, and bottomless need. And at the opening of the horseshoe, that empty space where all the luck can run out if you hang the shoe upside-down, was me, their rookie teacher, standing at the front of the hideous room, my own shining skin and brown top already smudged in chalk dust, with only a small table of carefully prepared notes and my black riding boots for protection. I remember thinking how the notes looked spread across the laminate tabletop, how overeager, how much they appeared than when they’d been on the warm wood of our kitchen table, a sweet baby in my lap.