Talk Less, Smile More
Talk less, smile more.
I opened my eyes. They had been clenched tightly shut as I took in a deep breath, preparing myself to enter the classroom.
Talk less, smile more.
It was a piece of advice I had gotten from a cheesy magazine advertisement. It was for toothpaste or something, who knows. I thought it might help me stop making an ass out of myself and maybe actually get some friends here. Talk less, and stop saying things that nobody gets, stop making references to TV shows and dark and twisty jokes that make everyone think you’re insane, Smile more, and maybe they’ll think you’re actually happy and not broken inside. Maybe.
Panama was standing beside me. How had I not noticed her approaching? Of course, her ninja-padded dancer’s feet straight from heaven.
“Are you going in… or what?” she asked, in a voice that said she knew exactly what was going on, that she saw me freaking out, saw me preparing myself for opening the door.
“I was just catching my breath, I was running late so I ran here and didn’t want to go in all, well, you know.”
Talk less.
“Sure.” She said, looking at the doorknob that was in my hand, “maybe you should take up some more cardio.”
Smile more.
Smile.
I threw the door open and entered, my face red and pulled tight, my smile was white-hot, my lips pressed together as hard as they could go.
Good enough.
She came in after me, as graceful and silent as ever, her footfalls those of a cat in fresh snow. Her long flowing skirt wrapped neatly around her legs as she twisted into her seat, her books neatly met her desk and she pulled her pen from her bun without letting a single hair loose.
I hated her.
I forced my face to relax, which is actually really difficult to do, by the way. I consciously undid the tension in my lips and cheeks, forced the crease between my eyebrows to dissipate, and tried to make my heart stop beating so visibly across my collarbone.
“Thoughts on the reading from Saramago? Anyone have any burning comments for us today?” Professor Diana (she preferred first names only in class, she felt it made things flow more smoothly, less stiff and procedural) was standing at the front of the room, holding her mangled, annotated copy of the novel. It would be very difficult to find something to say that she had not already scrawled in the margins.
8:00 p.m. on the dot, Diana wasn’t wasting any time with throat-clearing, we were on her time now. I flipped my book open to the section we read over the weekend. I hadn’t finished the whole section, but I felt like I had an okay grasp on it, enough to get my one participation requirement out of the way. As long as I acted fast, I could say something before someone else covered everything I knew.
“Radley, what did you think?”
My response poured from my mouth. I had thought it over way too long, trying to get the words to form perfectly before I got to class. I knew I’d be required to say at least one thing during each class period for the participation portion of our rubric, and I was determined not to make a complete fool of myself.
“Well, just from a purely craft-driven point, I thought it was interesting that he never gives the characters their names, like he’s taking away that power that a name has, and they’re just archetypes. They’re ‘the doctor’s wife’ and ‘the thief,’ but that’s all they get to be.”
“Good observation, yes, do you have anything you’d like to add onto that from a theory perspective? I think we can build on this.”
“Not really, I know there’s something there, but I don’t really have it off the top of my head. I thought I’d bring it up in case someone else had any thoughts.” I trailed off, looking around the room. Hopefully that sounded good enough to get her off my back for the rest of the period. A few hands stuck up one at a time. Mine stayed down for the rest of the hour-long discussion.
Nathan, a political science major, brought up the idea that it could be commentary on communism, which was a continual theme for him. I was looking forward to reading his final analysis of the book when we got around to that.
Panama was next.
“I think the reason he doesn’t give them names is that he is playing with structure. He’s breaking down the structure of the book, breaking your expectations and taking away one of your senses, causing instability through his narrative reflective of the instability that the characters have now that they are suddenly blinded. We don’t know these people, we don’t know anything about them except for their occupation, what they offered society before it broke down.”
Diana was nodding, smiling.
“Even more than that, I think it dehumanizes them. In the same way that they are being treated as subhuman in the facility because of their sudden condition, they are being stripped of name and reduced to an object.”
“Nice work. I feel like we’re really getting somewhere now.” Diana said, ready to take over the discussion and lead us into the next topic. She came over to Panama and gave her a high five. I fought the scoff that was bubbling to the surface.
By the end of class, I was so tired of hearing her voice I wanted to scream.
I grabbed my bag and made a beeline for the dance studio. I needed to blow off some steam and I didn’t particularly care that it was after-hours and I wasn’t supposed to be there alone. If I didn’t dance, I was going to punch something.
How is everything she does right? How does she keep it together? It’s not enough that she’s good at dance, she has to beat me at everything.
