Free You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood Page B

classroom. I am more than incredulous that some of our country’s favorite writers have a thriving teaching career and I have no idea how they do it. In the limited times I have taught on the college level, my students’ family problems, their bad habits, idiotic decisions, and insulting opinions, not to mention the demands of reading and evaluating their work, have preempted all my energy for writing. The sensitivity needed to say something positive to a puerile and sentimental childhood story; the facility to encourage the one talented writer in the class while remaining mindful of the feelings of the duds; the discipline required to stop myself from rewriting their crap entirely; the tact not to question their choice to become a writer at all; the requisite soundness of mind to admit to myself that any winsome 20-year-old who follows me around like a puppy and tells me my work changed her life is probably under psychiatric care and most assuredly trouble; in short all the psychological heavy lifting that does not appear on the syllabus but is incumbent on a good teacher, exhausted the same limited supply of emotional energy I had for my own work.
    I made good money as an artist in the schools and had no shortage of assignments but eventually returned to the grinding anonymity of restaurant work. I wasn’t
teaching them how to be fiction writers, or even, like the poets and dancers and photographers, imparting a watered down version of my trade. I was just an entertainer, a birthday party clown, a kind of Bozo-the-Artist who came into their classes with a new act every week. Frankly, I felt like a fraud.
    Although once, decades later, a balding man in his thirties stopped me on the street. “Hey wait!” He had a little girl in hand, probably his daughter, and he ran up to me excitedly. “Weren’t you the guy who came into my classroom one day with a shoebox full of flavor extracts?” I admitted that I was. “That was so cool, man,” he said to his daughter. “That was one of the only cool things that ever happened in school. What’s your name again?”
    I was surprised to find myself reacting with no small measure of pride. “Why, Mr. Nappy, the artist.”

A WORK IN F**KING PROGRESS

1.
    I n the autumn of the year I turned 30 years old Ronald Reagan was elected president, a right-wing working majority overtook both houses of congress, and Marge’s husband returned from a Caribbean vacation to announce that he was getting his vasectomy reversed and wanted a divorce. As the country embraced core family values, Marge and I, in practice if not by design, were suddenly a traditional monogamous couple, splitting our time between her house on Cape Cod and a cheap but enormous apartment in Cambridge, taking a family membership at the food co-op, acquiring two kittens, dividing kitchen chores, and hunkering down every day to write.
    Some four years before, I had contrived to meet Marge when my upstairs neighbor announced, coincidently on the afternoon of the first Passover Seder, that a notorious writer friend was coming to visit. Woman
on the Edge of Time , now a sci-fi classic, had just been released, and before that, Small Changes and Dance the Eagle to Sleep , both bibles of the New Left. In a photograph I had seen in Time magazine, Marge Piercy, with severe black bangs, a cigarette pursed in Gallic lips, looked like a French movie star. Because I couldn’t imagine what I might say upon being introduced, I interrupted their conversation with a kind of impromptu performance piece, appearing with a bowl of egg whites while attempting to whip them with a wire whisk. Nine out of ten successful women would have written me off as some incompetent busybody trying to make macaroons; Marge saw a profile from JDate: 26-year-old Jewish man, curly hair, likes to cook.
    Marge received all kinds of flack from women friends and feminist intellectuals. He’ll leave her when