Everything Is Under Control

The thing about Aritza is she’s dead. You can see where she’s lipsticked over missing lip. You can smell decomposition beneath the Jean Nate. I know she’s dead. Anyone who’s seen Walking Dead knows she’s dead. But the Human Resources department of Washington State School District 414 did not know she was dead and hired her to be my instructional assistant.
That is not the problem. The problem is, as an instructional assistant, she sucks. She really does.
Part of it is she’s a greenhorn, naïve in the ways of post-Covid public high school education. Aritza thinks we’re in this together: she and me against the hordes, the hordes being children, our students. My students: I am the teacher. It helps to remind myself of this. “I am the teacher,” I murmur, as teenagers stroll into class ten minutes after the bell.
“Hey,” some say with appreciative nods. Appreciative because I haven’t yet managed to do anything to interfere with their hang-time with friends in my classroom, which is what they understand my class to be.
“At least they’re not in the halls!” I tell Aritza, clinging to positivity lest I lose my marbles.
I have lost my marbles, along with my markers, paper clips, erasers, equity sticks, and workbook packets.
“Who wants Uber Eats?” Mustafa says, shuffling around the classroom. He’s a brash, good-looking kid with scraggly curls and a sly smile. Everyone’s eyes follow him.
“We’re not ordering take-out,” I say in the voice of the Warm Demander. It’s an equitable practice to use this tone, as opposed to that of the Technocrat, the Elitist, or the Sentimentalist. I clench my toes inside my clogs. “I like you—and I know you can do this. Books open!”
“Pizza roll,” Lourdes calls out.
Mustafa nods. “Anyone else?”
“Hey, now,” I say.
Two more students order pizza rolls, while a third opts for Jack-in-the-Box.
Aritza snaps her laptop open and starts to type.
What she’s typing, I soon learn, is an email to my supervisor. “This class is total chaos!” she writes. “We need help!”


In my life every now and then I am granted a moment of clarity, a moment when I feel my ancestors—bunch of Irish potato famine fleers who worked odd jobs, did time for failed, doomed heists, acquired crippling injuries in uncompensated elevator accidents, or founded soon-bankrupted taverns before crawling back to the homeland to drink themselves to early death—speak, or make a mumbling, broguish approximation. A moment when I can see the proverbial writing on the wall. Not the literal writing on the wall, which says, “This class sucks ass,” and which I suspect was written by Lourdes. The proverbial writing. And what it says is this: I need to get Aritza out of my classroom before she loses me my job.
“First off I don’t need help,” I tell the assistant principal, Griff, in a chance hallway meeting. All my meetings with Griff are chance hallway meetings. They happen pretty much every fifth period, when Griff patrols the hallways and I have a free period for planning and grading, or, if I feel like I’m drowning in wet cement, wandering the hallways looking for Griff. Griff is a hottie with a missionary background, a quick lurching step which brings him very suddenly upon one, and a way of peering down into one’s eyes from his surprising height with messianic compassion that triggers at once hot flashes and a twitching in one’s uterus, even if he is twelve years younger than one.
Griff, I’m pretty sure, had no part in my recent censure for having entered his office in the early morning and huddled in a ball on the floor with the lights out. Yes, he was the one who found me, but, no, he was not—I have this on no one’s authority but a very good hunch—the one who reported me. There were others. There are always others, among the adults who have chosen for their life’s work to remain in high school forever.
Why did I go into Griff’s office when I saw the room was empty is the question I could not and still cannot answer, except that sometimes a body knows what it needs, and my body in that moment needed to be curled in ball in an empty darkened room, and there was Griff’s office. Possibly I also wanted to soak up the Griffness of the room. Not in a sexual way. I’m just talking about the manly disorder of his desk, with its three immaculately sharpened pencils lying at odd angles as if they’d been shaken out from a box over a stack of printed-out spreadsheets, or the sour whiff of sweat emanating from a cycling jersey I found balled up in his bottom right desk drawer.
“Hello, Benita,” Griff says now.
“Hello.” I start to glow, cover it with a scowl. Meanwhile, FYI, I am looking pretty good. Recently, I’ve started dressing better for school. I make loops of tape around my fingers each morning and pat myself all over to remove dog hair. I’ve decided to try again with the thong. “You can ignore that email. I want you to know that. Everything is under control.”
“Everything is….?”
“Under control.” I do a half spin on the ball of my clog. My back arches slightly. Griff has a view, I can’t help but notice, of my backside.
And he looks at it. For one second he does.
“Except I have some concerns about my assistant.”
“Fill out a performance review.” He smiles down at me with the warmth of a loving God.


There was a time I thought of myself as a good teacher. You can soar as a teacher. You can get kids excited about something. In that moment you are transformed. You are Icarus, pinned aloft, buoyed by their faith, swells of air beneath you, dazzling warmth above. You don’t have to worry about what comes out of your mouth. Whatever it is, it is gold. Only very rarely do you surprise yourself with something that is not gold, something that is unintentionally funny or unintentionally revealing, leading to startled laughter that is directed at you and not with you. You remember you don’t actually have wings.
Those days, I understand, are gone. I’m not saying I can return to those days. I’m saying I need Aritza out of my classroom so I can fully inhabit my role as teacher without experiencing any more than the requisite amount of shame. If Aritza is present, projecting hostility, openly scoffing at me as much as at them, polluting the air with the unmistakable stench of decay, reminding me—as how could it not?—of the grave, of the impermanence of everything, that this is what I’ve chosen to do with my one wild and precious life, this!—I find it impossible to compel students to open their books, write things on worksheets, or remain in their seats holding pencils. With her gone, I can disappear into the work for approximately twelve to fifteen more years, after which I’ll have paid enough into my pension to retire, and I can lick my psychic wounds until my own death, which hopefully will not be a living one.


“What was the lesson today? They didn’t do shit,” Aritza offers the next day after class, handing me a log of students’ off-task actions in her tiny stabby script, as if we live in a world of consequence and just desserts, as if there is anything I can do with this information except blame myself and hope tomorrow will be different. I’m not wrong about this. Administrators have found school runs more smoothly when responsibility for student behavior remains with the teacher. Administrators also don’t use the word “behavior.” “What have you done to build a relationship with the student, and what are your feelings about why you failed?” a teacher might expect to hear when there are problems.
I look at the list. “10:07 Mustafa called Dmitry ‘cunt.’  Lourdes ripped page out of Mustafa’s notebook. Tariq put his head down. 10:09….”
“I could actually use your help circulating and dealing with these behaviors,” I say. “That would actually help me teach.”
She stares back at me. I actually can’t bear it. It’s too penetrating. She’s lost both sets of eyelashes and an eyelid, just the right. Her eyes, for all that, scald.
“What did Admin say about the porn incident?” she asks.
“Admin didn’t say anything about it.”
“Nothing? I saw you talking to Admin.”
“Not about that,” I say lightly.
I didn’t report the porn incident to Admin. It was too widespread. There were too many offenders. If I report half a dozen kids watching porn openly on computers in my classroom because they knew we were using a program that allowed us to see what was on their screens, questions would be raised, not about the kids but about me. And the assignment I’d given them—write a novel! The world needs your story!—was admittedly naïve. I see that now. I don’t need Admin to help me see that.
“This is ridiculous.” She makes a swatting motion at the air, and a waft of rot cuts through the cloud of Jean Nate. It slips into my nose and sinks into my brain and stays there, clamping down in the bottom right quadrant, giving me a headache. I fight a wave of panic, ancient, instinctive. It would be rude to back away.
“It sure is.”
“You can’t keep going like this. Benita.”
It’s my name on her lips that startles me. It gives me a jolt, like sticking a bobby pin in an electrical socket, a feeling I can identify pretty precisely because it is a thing I have done. Not often, just two or three times.
I grab the foam eraser and begin swiping student graffiti off the whiteboard. The gesture proves futile: they’ve used permanent marker. “A person can do this for a very long time.”


“Rolls her eyes at students and staff,” I type in an email to my supervisor that evening. It’s late at night and I’m at home on my couch with a laptop balanced on my lap, drinking wine from a coffee mug in front of a British crime drama. These days I can only handle school work when I’m half soused with the TV on, and nothing works better than British crime drama, with gentle-voiced Brits chatting reasonably about horrors, breaking them down into dry, actionable steps. “Plays Candy Crush throughout class. Refuses direct requests, like ‘Circulate,’ and ‘Remind students to stay on task.’ Questions staff’s judgment. Makes staff question staff’s reason for living. Ha ha.” I delete that. “Makes it hard for staff to get up in the morning, to enter the classroom. Makes it hard for staff to pretend staff isn’t living in a nightmare that will only end with staff’s death or retreat into senility. Makes senility seem appealing, a wise choice.”
I delete that, too.
On the TV screen, a woman lifts an accusing finger. “It’s you!” she says, voice cracking with emotion. “It’s you!” It jangles my nerves. It doesn’t soothe me at all.
I shut the TV off.
Faintly, from outside, I hear a broken-off squeal and a scuffle.
My dog Potato, a surly, dirty-white rat terrier I adopted from a shelter, is out chasing rodents. He was supposed to be a cattle dog, a breed I admired for their loyalty, affection, and shaggy grace. When he was small you could sort of see it in him, but as he grew older and more surly, his legs refusing to lengthen, it became obvious what he was and what he wasn’t.
I step out on the deck. “Potato?”
I can’t see stars—too much light bleeds from nearby houses. Somewhere far off an animal howls, then another. Coyotes? A family of them? A goddamned pack?  It’s good to know they’re out there, I tell myself, surviving in the exurbs. But Potato.
I take a few steps out into the dark yard. A breeze carries the scent of pine, and beneath the slightest hint of decay. Then it’s gone, luffed away by a colder, wetter wind. “Aritza?” My voice squeaks with fear.
In the shrubbery by the neighbor’s fence, I see a darker darkness, a coagulation of darkness, a roundness of it, a clot. It fills me with fury, that clot.
How dare it. How dare she.
“Aritza?” I say. I don’t know what I’m going to do to it, to her. Punch her. Break her apart. Tear into the soil and rot of her. Make compost.
But the form, when I reach it, dissolves into wet clumps of fallen leaves and clods of earth kicked up by moles. Into nothing, no form at all.


The next morning, Aritza is hunched over the little desk outside my classroom. For just a second I mistake her for a student, one of mine. It’s her narrow shoulders, the dark roots of her dyed blond hair. It’s evidence she put in effort—make-up, perfume—for this job where she is failing, where she is pleasing no one, the same way my students shower and put on outfits and fix their hair to come to school, where they fail and fail again and eventually drop out. She is one more person I have been responsible for and have not helped.
But when she lifts her head and I see what she’s written—“This class sucks ass”—I feel all right about it all.
“They’re taking me out of this class,” she says.
I busy myself with the lock. With stacks of papers. With light switches. Finally, I dare a glimpse of her face. I don’t see anger in the lashless eyes. Just a wounded awareness.
“That’s rough.”
“It’s whatever. I’ll pick something up at the elementary school.”
“Will you? That’s great.” I try to picture this: the dead woman dragging herself into an elementary classroom, lurching among bright-colored posters and sticker charts, amongst youngsters with lunchboxes and light-up sneakers. The parents allowing this. The teachers.
“You should come with me, Benita.”
For a moment, after she’s limped off down the hallway, I can see it. I see us there together in the bright classroom, me and the zombie, the zombie and me, amidst rows of wriggling students, their eyes wide open, their dreams alive.