My wife Ruth took a job teaching English to junior high students in Woodbine, Iowa, and we agreed that I would stay home and care for our twins. My oldest daughter, who was then living with us, moved to Woodbine with us, too, and there completed her senior year of high school. For Ruth, teaching junior high English was torture. One night early in December she woke me from a sound sleep at 3:00 in the morning because, she said, she had something she had to tell me and it couldn’t wait.
“I’ve lost my faith in god,” she said.
Hmm.
The next night almost the very same thing—
“I don’t want to wake up anymore.”
Hmm.
In the morning my wife and I agreed that I should find a job so she could quit hers and do something else. I read the ads in the Sunday World-Herald and applied for four—ombudsman for an Indian reservation in South Dakota, deputy director for city development in my home town of Shenandoah, counselor in a halfway house for troubled teenagers in Ames where I had earned my bachelor’s degree fifteen years earlier, and instructor of English at the west campus of a nearby community college. I was invited to interview for all four positions. At the conclusion of the second interview I was offered the job on the spot. On January 2 of 1980 I began teaching English in Omaha.
Whew—
Not so fast!
I’d arrived just as the annual evaluations of faculty by their supervisors—and supervisors by their superiors—were taking place. My new colleagues tried immediately to enlist me in their causes. In confidence I was told by four or five different colleagues whom they believed ought to be fired and whom not.
“Marcella ought to be fired,” Grace told me.
“Grace is burned out—all used up,” Marcella told me. “She ought to be fired.”
“Fish ought to be fired,” Julie told me.
Fish was my new boss, the man who had just hired me, the supervisor of developmental studies and the only person of color at the west campus of the college. Though I had been on the job for only three weeks an annual evaluation of me was required nevertheless so to the office of Mr. Fish I reported as appointed. Fish was encouraging and friendly and our conversation was both informal and brief. At its conclusion he asked me if I had encountered any problems in my new position so far.
Fool that I was—trying still as best I could to be honest and to tell the truth all the time—I told my supervisor that I was troubled, uncomfortable, and confused by the ugly academic politics in the office.
Grace thinks Marcella should be fired, I explained, Marcella thinks Grace should be fired and, I added, neither Grace nor Marcella seems to approve of the job that Julie is doing. I didn’t even really know these people. I had just met them. To me they all seemed normal, cooperative, competent.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Julie has had a few problems,” Fish responded.
“Julie thinks you should be fired!” I laughed—at the absurdity of it all.
Fish smiled and shrugged.
A week later Julie met with Mr. Fish for her own annual evaluation. They conferred in his office for over an hour and when Julie finally emerged she was furious, livid, cursing under her breath, and as she strode through our common office area she made a beeline straight for my desk.
“Did you tell Fish I thought he should be fired?” she demanded.
“No,” I lied.
It was the first outright lie I had told in five years.
My twins were only two years old, my oldest daughter was living with me and Ruth, I was still paying child support each month for my oldest son, who lived with his mother and her husband in Shenandoah, and my wife Ruth, totally exhausted by her job in junior high, planned to quit in May. I needed my new job. I felt desperate.
Trapped.
It was two months before I could bring myself to confess to Julie that indeed I had told Fish what she had told me. I apologized and started to explain.
Julie interrupted me.
“Forget it,” she said.
She simply dismissed the matter with a wave and never mentioned it again—for which I was much relieved and still feel grateful. It had been a much bigger matter to me than it had been to Julie.
Because of our study and practice of religion for two years together in Fayette, I felt obliged to tell my friends Paul, Billy, and John of this incident. Each reacted to it in the same way.
“Pressure.”
They understood.
Rarely did I speak of my vow to be honest. On one occasion my three nephews inquired about the religious experience to which I and others in the family sometimes alluded. I told some stories and boasted of my years of honesty. After my brother and his three teenage sons had gone home my wife corrected me.
“You smoked pot for years,” she said. “That was a lie.”
Yes.
From many people I’d kept that secret for a long time and I had not quit completely until five months after my first grandchild had been born. I told my nephews what Ruth had said the next time I saw them.
Once I realized how foolish I had been in labeling my year in heaven my enlightenment I hardly spoke of it again ever except perhaps obliquely by a word or two just in passing.
Basically I just kept quiet about it.
lies
