Torment

“I fucked up bad”: Justin cracks his neck, talking to nobody. Fifteen responsible children, final semester college seniors, bloodshot, collars undone, gorgeously exhausted, return from Wall Street interviews in attitudes of surrender on the Dinky— the one-car commuter train connecting Princeton to the New York line. Panic-sweat sheens their faces. Justin hasn’t seen me yet. “Something’s fucked with my tie.” He’s right. I see his future, the weight he’ll gain first in his face, then gut and ass, the look of bad luck he’ll haunt his bad jobs with. He tears off the tie. Elephants on it. Fatigue,swollen ankles, the midwife said. The worst discomforts of pregnancy. I wrote those down. But she’s wrong: self-pity.Strange dreams, she said. No dreams. Discarded newspapers— business section, money, real estate, auto— sift apart to quartos and folios underfoot. “Shut up, Justin,” says the girl across from him. I hardly recognize Brianna in her interview hair. She scratches her face, fingers trembling from the day’s aftershocks. “I wanted,” she counts on her fingers, performing the sitcom of her tragedy, “Tribeca loft, expense account, designer clothes so haute they don’t look it, my very own Tesla, summer home in the Hamptons I’m too busy to use.” “You wanted money,” says Justin. Brianna: “It went down with the towers.” I spent my lopsided day lifting my belly back towards center, interviewing for adjunct jobs. There’s a half-moon in half-clouds up over the tracks. Justin spreads over three seats, texts with his thumbs, talks: “The Lehman Brothers guy asks me, Did you ever sell anything?Sell me a bottle of water. I’m like fu-uck. To say something I say ‘Why do you like water?’ He says...” Justin fixes a diamond stud back in his ear. “They’ll let me know.” Fifteen responsible children sigh in disappointed relief. Somebody they know didn’t get the job they didn’t get. I sleep. Wake. Beautiful clothes spread bodiless before me! Tailored black suits and skirts, silk ties, ephemera of sheer and filmy stockings deflated over seat backs. Brianna looks around, no conductor coming, squats to peel off, in one motion, skirt, hose, underpants, step butt-naked into soft chino shorts I’ll never be able to afford. “Nervous crotch sweat,” she says. I keep trying to look not-quite-40 in a different way than I’m not-quite-40. The woman interviewer looked at my belly. “As a new mother would you have time to be literary mama to your students?” So I could sue when they don’t hire me for the job I don’t want. Justin looks up from his iPhone: “Soon-Ji got three offers. Fuck.” He flips the curl his mother’s fingers crimped, first day of pre- K into his four-year-old forelock. “He’s guessing he’ll go with Goldman Sachs.” Brianna grabs her neck in living garrote. She high-fives anybody she can reach in gloomy delight. She gobbles snack-pack popcorn, licks her fingers; bits drop yellow from her lips. “My mom will go crazy Deutsche Bank didn’t offer.” She sees me. “I didn’t realize that was you with your hair up. Look, Just.” She high-fives me. “It’s Professor.” Is Brianna crying? “Don’t call me Professor,” I say, dozens of times a semester. “I’m a writer, not a teacher.” Justin grabs a Norton Anthology out of his five-hundred-dollar briefcase. “Fuck. What are we supposed to read for tomorrow?” “Prufrock, dummy,” Brianna says. “You’re a good professor.” She condescends through tears. “Poor baby,” mocks Justin, slumping so low in the seat I only see his shoe soles on the arm rest. The train swooshes through suburban tracts. The moon gets smaller. Brianna arrives mornings to workshop in a fake hurry and the sweats she slept in, probably rolls back in bed after. She hands out slight, surprising poems, apologizes, sips cardboard-container coffee in a recyclable sleeve, turns her BlackBerry to vibrate. It moans like indigestion through class. I hand her one of my self-pity tissues. My ankles are slim. Brianna hates her name. “So tacky. I’d be a Kelly if I were twenty years older.” I’d like to be able to hate her. I’m turning into my Favorite Teachers—so kind, so industrious, so interested and interesting. “Sorry I’m late with my portfolio,” she says through sniffles. She dabs her lip. “I had to prepare for,” a breath, “interviews.” A few times a semester I say “It’s only poetry.”Gumbleeds! nosebleeds! the midwife predicted, and it’s true, my Kleenexes are measled with blood,weird hairs,stretch marks, frequent catnaps,hip joints so loose you must take care