By Jenny Shank
Kimberly Pritchard shivered in the air-conditioned chill of the athletic building and hesitated by the room where her assigned football players waited. Her research grant hadn’t come through, so instead of spending the summer on her Beowulf thesis, she would pass it tutoring football players for ten dollars an hour in an athletic building that was as impressive as Heorot, King Hrothgar’s grand hall. To prepare, she had spoken to the athletic department’s academic adviser about each student and looked them up in the football program’s media guide he’d given her, but the adviser’s personal notes and the guide’s stats on sprint times and weight-lifting records blurred together. She entered the room, finding two football players seated across from each other at a table, slouching in their chairs, their knees spread wide:
Javon Green, 6’0”, 180, Jr. wide receiver out of Pasadena, Calif. Strengths: Runs a 100 in 10.29, was 1-for-1 passing for 25 yards (halfback option) last season, good with the ladies. Weaknesses: Suffered a fractured bone in his right foot last fall, needs to pass six hours this summer to be eligible come August.
and
Darryl Taggert, 6’3″, 230, Soph. tight end out of Chicago, Ill. Strengths: Earned PrepStar All-America honors in high school, played in all eleven games (no starts) as a true freshman last season. Weaknesses: Doesn’t like to talk much around most white people, which hurts him in participation grades.
Taggert’s stomach shuddered audibly and he looked down at it with concern. “Did that check you wrote at the grocery store bounce?” he asked his friend.
“It did backflips, dog,” Javon said, shaking his head.
Kimberly stood at the door, her glasses pushed up onto her forehead. Why had she decided to wear a blazer, as if she were teaching a class? She should have remembered that she was nothing more than a summer school tutor. As she turned on the light, she imagined her own entry in the media guide:
Kimberly Pritchard, 5’0″, 100, 3rd Yr. Ph.D. student out of Pennington, N.J. Strengths: Adept at many languages, plays the flute, has owned a 4.0 GPA since kindergarten, with the exception of fourth grade when she earned a C in penmanship. Weaknesses: Socially awkward, obsessed with medieval literature.
She dropped her book-filled bag on the table with a thud. “I’m Kimberly.” She looked from one to the other. “I’ll be your language tutor this summer.”
The less massive of the two men stood up. “I’m Javon Green,” he said with a prime-time grin, extending a hand, everything about him golden. He had tawny skin and his dark eyes exuded an intimate warmth. She couldn’t hold his gaze.
As she shook his hand, she tried to recall if she’d ever before touched such a physically beautiful man. His lithe strength reminded her of Yul Brynner in “The King and I,” looking like he might perform a handspring at any moment. “Yes,” she said absently, “you’re on my list.”
“This is Darryl Taggert,” Javon said, presenting his teammate.
Taggert nodded curtly. He remained seated, his muscled arms crossed over his chest.
“Well, Lil’ Kim,” Javon said, “I need to pass sign language one and two this summer so I can get that language requirement done.”
“I should have taken one more year of Spanish in high school,” Taggert said to Javon, ignoring Kimberly. “That class was easy at my school. Teacher liked to eat. You just had to bring in Mexican food every Friday.”
“But it ain’t easy here,” Javon said. “I went to Spanish class one day last semester. The teacher wasn’t talking any English. Shit, I’m taking the class so I can learn Spanish. I dropped that for Current Jazz quick.”
“Sign language?” Kimberly asked.
“Yeah Miss, that’s what we’re taking this summer,” Javon said.
“I know French, German, Old English, and Italian,” she said, laughing nervously. “I do not know sign language.”
The smile dropped from Javon’s face, his glow dimming. Taggert threw her a look that fairly rumbled.
“I’ll go straighten this out.” She rushed out the door. She paused two feet down the hallway, realizing she’d forgotten to grab her bag, and turned to fetch it, then reprimanded herself. She was thinking like her boyfriend Chance, who had been printing out articles about various Pac-12 football players’ brushes with the law and attaching them to the refrigerator since she accepted the job.
Before her grant was denied, Kimberly had felt sure her proposal for a Beowulf website, complete with multi-media presentations in English and Old English, had outshone the turgid essays submitted by her less technologically adept colleagues. But she’d been the victim of a love triangle in which she wasn’t involved, and had ended up on the wrong side of the department battle lines. Since she started school, she’d been on a straight path that seemed sure to lead to a Ph.D. and a plum tenure-track position, but suddenly she’d been knocked off course. She hoped the setback in her research wouldn’t harm her prospects of landing a good job.
Chance had laughed when she told him about her summer job. “What can you possibly teach those barbarians?” he’d said. “How to scratch themselves with greater efficacy?”
“They’re just students, like any others,” she’d said. Chance, whose research in the Irish long poem had been funded for the summer, was irritating her now. She was beginning to loathe the way he keened along to Pink Floyd, the way his toes cracked when he walked barefoot, the way he recited Seamus Heaney in an unconvincing brogue. Worse, he remained friendly with Renata, the woman who had won the grant instead. Now Kimberly felt like the Grendel of her department, banished to the fens, seething with grievance.
Kimberly applied to be an athletic department tutor because another grad student told her that the football players never showed for study sessions, so the tutors were paid to sit around and do their own work. The English building lacked air conditioning, and in the summer months it was hard to think through the heat-induced fug in her cubicle, but the athletic building was refreshingly brisk, the floors and ceilings free of mildew and water damage. She had expected to correct a few elementary French compositions during the forty hours she put in a week and consume the rest with her own research. She hoped to make a comeback this summer, perhaps by writing a paper that would be featured at that year’s Medieval Studies conference.
“There’s been a mistake,” Kimberly told the athletic department’s academic adviser, a slim man with a neat mustache who always wore khaki slacks and a black or gold sports shirt with the school’s logo. In the photo on the wall of him standing in the middle of the football team, he looked like an insect.
“You’re good with languages, right?” The adviser barely looked up from his papers.
“I’m proficient in several.”
“Then this will be easy. Go to ASL class with them every day, make sure all ten of them show, and check to see they get their assignments done.”
“Why sign language?”
“Our guys tend to be visual learners. Plus, the teacher was something of an athlete at one time, so he’s sympathetic. You’d be amazed at how many professors see one of our guys walk into their class and write an automatic D in their grade books.”
Kimberly nodded, pretending to go along with what she took to be the athletic department’s running gripe. She pictured herself leading the football players to class, a hen trailed by her gargantuan chicks. If Renata saw her, she’d probably laugh over it with the other English department powers at one of their brie and pinot gris picnics to which Kimberly was never invited. For Kimberly, it had always been about the book itself—her love for Beowulf. But for everyone else it seemed to be a cutthroat battle for spoils. She hated how Chance, who handled the English department’s mail, never posted fliers for grants and competitions he wanted to enter himself. She’d show them she could work a regular job and still accomplish more than any of them. “All right,” Kimberly told the academic adviser. “Where and when is this class held?”
Part Two
The Professor: Joe Burkhart, 6’0″, 200, American Sign Language Ph.D. out of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Strengths: he’s deaf and doesn’t consider it a weakness, a personable father of two who holds shotput and discus records in the Deaf Olympics. Weaknesses: He can’t hear students’ cheating whispers during an exam.
The Game: American Sign Language (ASL) 101
Playing Field: RM 210, Knavely Arts and Sciences, no air conditioning.
Game Time: 9 to 11 a.m.with one 10-minute halftime, M-F
The first morning of ASL class, Kimberly sat in the back and studied the students as they filed into the room. Her football players crowded in: six black, three white, one Samoan. They sat around the perimeter of the classroom, snug in the high school-style wooden desks, massive legs spread out before them. They wore T-shirts and mesh shorts, their feet in summer sandals. The rest of the students were women in the communications graduate program: five, all white, between the ages of thirty and fifty, several wearing shapeless batik dresses. They sat front and center, glancing back at the football players and then whispering among themselves.
Through a hearing interpreter, Joe Burkhart, a barrel-chested man with a silver crew cut, emphasized that he allowed no talking in class. He had a translator for the first day, and after that they would have to overcome their language differences through gestures and signs. It was odd, Kimberly thought, that she couldn’t take notes. If she looked down, she had no idea what was going on. Joe demanded constant eye contact. They started with the alphabet, then learned how to introduce themselves and inquire about each other’s well-being—standard first semester language stuff. The only sounds as they worked were the wheeze of the ancient air conditioner, noise from the football players shifting in uncomfortable seats, and the faint ticking of the clock.
Kimberly had always enjoyed helping the students that came to her office hours, panicked about writing an essay. She’d take out a clean sheet of paper, convince them to talk about their vague ideas, and jot down anything they said that had an inkling of insight. She’d send the students home with clear plans, their eyes no longer on the verge of tears. But after a few days of ASL class, Kimberly realized that she would be of no use in helping the football players study. She could learn any other language that she’d tried, but she had no memory for ASL. She wrote down the vocabulary words, but what good did that do without a picture? She tried to make crude drawings of Joe’s hands, but they flitted from one sign to the next too quickly. There was no textbook. But even with a picture, she couldn’t make her hands obey.
The football players understood ASL: no papers to write, no presentations to give. Talk with your hands, that’s all, couldn’t be simpler. It wasn’t much different than learning the play signs the coaches flashed from the sidelines. Not that they would practice ASL unless Kimberly forced them.
Sometimes, they told her, Joe lifted weights in the gym when they were there, and they’d sign HELLO to him, inquire HOW YOU?
In class, The grad students sat stiff and straight-faced in their desks, looking sufficiently appalled whenever the guys kidded with Joe, purposely substituting the sign “SEX” for the sign “MEET,” which were similar, the former with two fingers on each hand extended while the fists tapped each other sideways, the latter with one finger extended on each hand while the fists tapped upright. The players couldn’t sit comfortably in their desks for long, and when their attention wavered Joe would get the students up and moving, working in groups, signing to each other. He gave them an assignment to write a skit in ASL to perform the following week, the day before the first exam.
A grad student named Cecily, who seemed to be the ringleader, invited Kimberly to join their skit group. Kimberly could guess her stats.
Cecily Grassler, 5’5″, 160, 2nd Yr. Ph.D. student out of Greeley, Colo. Strengths: As the sixth child in her family, honed a fierce competitive instinct. Won several purple ribbons for her dahlia arrangements at the Weld county fair. Weaknesses: Unatheltic, suffers from chronic cold feet and hands.
Kimberly had no desire to work with the grad students. They reminded her of Renata. “Well, I don’t know,” she said.
“Lil’ Kim’s with us,” Javon said. “We need a female.” He motioned for her to follow him to the corner where two other football players huddled.
Kimberly turned to go, but Cecily caught her arm with her chilly hand and whispered in her ear. “Are you sure? They’ll make you do all the work.”
“No,” Kimberly said. “I can assure you that they won’t.”
“Suit yourself,” Cecily said, turning abruptly to join the other grad students, who were writing down the skit they planned to perform, while the football players joked and signed to each other, working without the medium of English.
Joe circulated to offer help and he bantered easily with the football players, but there was an occasional miscommunication. A tight end wanted to speak about the woman he called his baby mama, compressing the double-arm rocking sign for BABY and the open-handed thumb chin tap for MOTHER together, but no matter how many times he repeated himself, Joe didn’t seem to understand.
The grad students signed with rigid formality, hands bobbing from one shape to the next instead of flowing between them. Many of the football players had an inborn grace for ASL, their movements fluid and precise. Even some of the 350 pounders, their eyes squinty from the encumbrance of so much facial bulk, could sign with a casual ease that Kimberly found awe-inspiring, dyslexic with the language as she was.
* * *
The skit was due the next day and the first exam approached, but during study hall one afternoon, a lineman refused to focus, drawing the others into a conversation about the respective merits of Hostess and Dolly Madison snack cakes. “Forget Twinkies,” said
Roland Riddock, 6’2″, 300, Sr. left offensive guard out of Plano, Texas. Strengths: As a high school senior made Dave Campbell’s Texas Super Team, allowed only four sacks in 260 pass plays. Weaknesses: Homophobic, addicted to snack cakes.
He pounded his pinkish, freckled fist against the table. “Zingers are the best.”
“Yeah,” Kimberly said, looking up from her copy of the c manuscript. “Raspberry Zingers.”
Riddock gave her a level, serious look, and he did not return her smile. “Just any fuckin’ Zinger, man.”
Kimberly blinked. “We should go watch the DVD.” She could at least sit them in front of the TV and hope they’d absorb something.
“Let’s do it tomorrow,” Riddock said, “The language lab is too far away.”
She needed to be firm, or she’d lose them for the whole study session. “Let’s go now.” She rose to leave.
The offensive line did not budge. They were sluggish when they weren’t working out. They went to fantastic lengths to conserve their energy, stirring only to sign HUNGRY back and forth to each other across the table by making a “C” with the right hand and moving it down the center of the chest from below the throat. They complained to Kimberly that the dining halls were closed and their stipends exhausted. They lived six to a house with no furniture except for mattresses on the ground and the refrigerator that came with the place. They ate cases of ramen noodles and whatever they could beg, bum, sample, or get for free. The coaches gave them money for food and housing, provided that they pass at least three credit hours each summer school session. But the only person who could keep football players sheltered and full on their allowance would be a depression-era farm mother of ten who knew how to turn drippings and scraps from one meal into something miraculously different the next day.
“I don’t think I can move,” Riddock said. He whined in ASL, signing HUNGRY, HUNGRY, HUNGRY.
“Now,” Kimberly ordered. She had some Milk Duds in her backpack. Maybe she’d lure the guys out by dropping a trail.
Eventually they lumbered down the stairs, sweating fluently. They had come straight from their required daily run, all without showering except for:
Lamont Strickler, 6’4″, 320, Jr. right offensive guard out of Memphis, Tenn. Strengths: First-team selection by the Football News last season, led the team in finishing points (similar to pancake blocks) last season, fastidious about grooming. Weaknesses: A mama’s boy, not mean enough for the NFL.
They began the walk across campus to the language lab, a journey that usually took Kimberly five minutes, but the guys dragged it out, griping. Javon walked beside her. He was a foot taller than her, and when she turned to the side she saw his golden bicep bulging from his sleeve. She thought of a line about Beowulf: There was no one else like him alive. “So what’s your story, Lil’ Kim?” he asked. “How come you’re tutoring us this summer?”
“Didn’t get my grant,” she said.
“Why not?” He looked at her directly, seeming genuinely interested.
After weeks of complaining about the incident to Chance, he’d forbidden her to bring it up. “It’s like this,” she began. “One of the deans of the College of Arts and Sciences was dating a much-younger English professor who was promoted to the department chair. Everyone thought she’d slept her way into her position, so when the dean dumped her, she wanted to assume more responsibility to prove her worth. So she took over the research grant proposal committee. She also decided she was a lesbian and began dating Renata, another Ph.D. student in my department, and gave her the grant I applied for, even though Renata had just switched topics a few weeks earlier and had barely done any research.” She pictured Renata’s snotty moue, her sharp little nose dotted with a ruby on the left side, the glint of her dyed black cherry hair. Kimberly clenched her fists, but stopped herself from saying more, feeling suddenly abashed.
Javon didn’t speak for a moment as they walked along the concrete path. “Damn,” he said, finally.
“I’m sorry,” Kimberly said. She never spoke like this to her students. There was something about the heat of summer and the deserted campus that had relaxed her into forgetting what she’d learned her first semester teaching: if you get too personal with your students, they’ll get too personal with you.
“I shouldn’t have told you,” she said.
“Sure you should’ve. I just wondered why you were stuck with us is all.” He put his hand on her shoulder. Her heart trilled. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he said. “Those fools will soon realize they can’t mess with Lil’ Kim.”
Part Three
Javon’s nickname for her had spread to all the football players. She hadn’t told Chance about it, because he’d only mock it. She imagined breaking up with him and buying herself a pair of spike heels, getting a tattoo of a tiger’s paw raking her left breast like the one sported by a rap star on the cover of a magazine Taggert brought to study hall. She’d stuck to one plan for her whole life, but now fantasized about other possible selves.
When they reached the language lab, Kimberly passed her student I.D. to the clerk for collateral and took the DVD into one of the cramped viewing rooms. The players settled in as best they could, three sizes too large for furniture built for regular humans. When any of them belched, farted, or made a remark about female anatomy, they glanced at her, a sheepish check for her reaction. She imagined it had been like this for the women in King Hrothgar’s mead hall.
The DVD series featured the Bravo family, a jovial crew, who did things like visit the grocery store together. The mother woke her children for breakfast by kissing them on their cheeks. The narrator, Billy Seago, who always wore a black turtleneck, could stop the family’s action at any time and appear in the middle of the living room to explain the vocabulary while the Bravo family remained frozen. As the DVD explained, in ASL a signer must raise his eyebrows when asking yes or no questions. When asking who, what, when, where, why, or how, the signer must furrow his brow.
The Bravo family was having a good time at the grocery store. They didn’t smile—they beamed. They didn’t laugh—they silently guffawed. Their exaggerated facial expressions resembled bad acting.
“Why do they have to be so dramatic about everything?” Javon asked. “Are there any black deaf folks?”
“I wonder if they have deaf porno,” Riddock said.
“I hate this!” Strickler threw down his notebook. “They do the signs all differently than Joe does. How am I supposed to know which way to do them?”
“Joe’s always right,” Riddock said. “I like Joe. These other guys are homos.” He pounded his notebook with his fist. “Billy Seago,” he said, with contempt.
“Don’t you think you should be paying attention to the video?” Kimberly asked.
“Aw, we know this stuff,” Riddock said. “This is just review.” He pressed the fast forward button and scanned through it. “See, they’re only just now teaching numbers. We learned numbers on the first day.”
Kimberly tried to remember the numbers, whispering to herself by keeping her hands low, extending her index finger twice, rapidly, for eleven. Javon saw her.
“Look,” he said, “one, two, three, four,” counting with his hands so that she could see. She counted along with him. “Do you have to pass this class too?”
“NO,” she signed, bringing her right thumb, index and middle fingers together a few times.
“That sucks,” he said. “You should at least get some credits for the class.”
“I don’t need any credits.” She’d started college as an undergraduate with enough AP credits to skip two semesters, and finished two degrees in the time it took most to complete a B.A. She felt as though she’d been born with credits, and the credits had a weight to them she could no longer bear. Sometimes she wanted to abandon her studies and go forth into the world, swinging her hips, the way women with no credits did.
Yet, Beowulf awaited her like a neglected lover. She wondered how many of Grendel’s problems were caused by the fact that he couldn’t speak. As she had explained on her website, Anglo-Saxon society prized verbal prowess, and so speechless Grendel was remembered only as a villain in other people’s poems and not as the hero of his own. She knew she should be working on her thesis, but she had developed an obsession with ASL, reviewing signs at night with a visual dictionary on the Internet. Chance occasionally looked at her screen over her shoulder and called it a waste of time. She could now produce many of the individual signs, but her sentences didn’t flow the way the guys’ did.
Kimberly dressed carefully the next morning for the skit performance, trying to figure out how to portray her role: an attractive woman at a bar. She was nervous about performing with Javon, Riddock, and Strickler. She settled on a black halter dress with an A-line skirt and a cherry pattern that she’d bought on a whim and hadn’t yet been bold enough to wear. Why the hell not? she decided. When Chance saw her before she left, he trailed his fingertips along her waist and asked, “Why would you wear that dress?”
She’d shrugged. “It’s summer. I’m wearing a summer dress.”
But when she walked into class, she saw everyone else had worn regular clothes. She cursed her knack for always wearing the inappropriate thing. When it was time to begin, she reluctantly stood and joined her group.
“You look beautiful,” Strickler said in his charming Memphis lilt.
Javon spun her. “Lil’ Kim,” he said, “stepping out.” He rapped Riddock on his fleshy pink arm. “Don’t she look good?”
Riddock swallowed a mouthful of glazed doughnut he’d boasted about snatching from a freshman orientation spread on the way to class. “Like a cherry Zinger.”
Javon clutched his heart with both hands and looked at her as he faded back. Kimberly knew this was a cheesy gesture, and that there was no scenario in which she and Javon would ever be together. But being near him awakened some hunger in her.
The communications grad students performed their skit first, a scene about a mishap in buying fruit at the grocery store that was tame and cheery enough to have been lifted from the Bravo family videos. Kimberly’s group went next. She sat on a chair that was meant to be a barstool, and ordered a glass of wine from Strickler, circling a W hand around her mouth. Riddock walked into the bar, did an exaggerated double take in Kimberly’s direction, then signed, “HEY BABY, WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?” Kimberly turned her back to him and crossed her arms over her chest. Then Javon entered the bar and hit on Riddock, using the same pick-up line, which the guys had been proud of memorizing. Riddock angrily signed, “I’M NOT GAY,” and the two got into an altercation, throwing in every coarse and dirty sign they knew. Meanwhile, Kimberly and Strickler the bartender flirted, batting their eyelashes at each other, and at the end of the skit, Kimberly and Strickler linked arms and walked off, and Riddock and Javon linked arms and left in the opposite direction.
The grad students asked Joe to explain some of Riddock’s colorful vocabulary. As Joe fingerspelled and wrote on the chalkboard to translate, Cecily shook her head. Earning Cecily’s disapproval felt like a win for Kimberly’s team.
Joe continued the vocabulary lesson, but one of the younger women spoke aloud when his back was turned to the chalkboard. “That’s hardly appropriate.”
“They shouldn’t be using that kind of language in the classroom,” Cecily said.
“ASL is just like any other language,” Kimberly threw in, “If you learn only words that are pretty or kind, you don’t know the half of it.”
Cecily turned around and shushed her with an exaggerated motion so Joe noticed and signed “NO TALK,” to Kimberly.
She signed “SORRY,” rubbing her heart with her fist, and then stared at the back of Cecily’s head, picturing it hanging from Heorot’s rafters. The women considered themselves sensitive to the deaf community. They laughed too loud and long at Joe’s most frivolous jokes and made a show of their outrage when Joe told the story about a deaf man who’d been pulled over by the cops and was shot as he reached for a pad and pen to communicate with the officer. But they couldn’t make Joe love them best, so they invented a new competition—the women began sending an early emissary to the language lab after class so they could beat the football players to the lone copy of the DVD.
Joe called for a ten-minute break after the skits, and Kimberly spent it checking off the boxes next to the football players’ names on her attendance sheet, and asking the guys for their grades on the last quiz. When Kimberly went to get a drink of water in the hallway, Cecily and the grad students followed.
“What were you doing, taking attendance?” Cecily asked, smiling aggressively.
“I have to make sure the football players come to class,” Kimberly explained. “It’s my job.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Cecily said. The other four murmured in agreement. “Who pays your salary?”
“The athletic department.”
“So taxpayers’ money goes toward baby-sitting football players.” Cecily’s pack was nodding, Sing it sister.
“Just a minute,” Kimberly said, heat rising in her face. “The football players bring in more revenue than any other part of this university. And what do they get?” She was a little surprised at herself, but she continued. “Used, that’s what. Do you think it’s easy for them to be the only black people in this town? People come up to them at the grocery store and give them athletic advice. They train and practice all year long, and few of them will make it to the pros. Half of them will end up with injuries for their entire lives. And everyone thinks they’re stupid, and that the teachers augment their grades. Providing them tutoring so they can graduate is the least the university should do.”
Cecily’s jaw twitched. Kimberly knew she had crossed over in Cecily’s perception, from one of us to one of them. And Lil’ Kim liked that.
Part Four
That day at study hall, the football players sat around, looking at sports magazines, begging barbecue chips from the center who was foolish enough to stuff a bag of them in his backpack, forgetting the telltale crinkle would give his stash away.
“Guys, come on, the test’s tomorrow,” Kimberly prodded.
“Don’t worry, Lil’ Kim,” Strickler said, settling his ball cap over his eyes and leaning back in the chair for a nap, “we know the stuff.”
“Hey,” Riddock said, “you’re in the English department, right?”
“Yes,” Kimberly said, eager to redeem herself as a tutor. “I could help you with an essay.”
“No, I just wanted to know something.” He leaned forward, his massive fingers interlaced on the table before him. “Javon says the English Department is full of Peppermint Patties.”
Kimberly flinched. Javon had told everyone about her problems. Used it as fodder for jokes. She looked at Javon, who sat at the computer in the corner of the room. What had she been thinking, that the golden boy of the football team was her friend? He probably couldn’t help but deploy his charms on any female he encountered.
“I’ve got to get some English credits in the fall,” Riddock continued. “Could you tell me which professors to avoid?” He signed LESBIAN, resting an L-shaped hand against his cheek and chin. “Peppermint Patties hate football players.”
“Oh?” Kimberly said, realizing that Riddock had probably taken care to choose the least offensive synonym for lesbian that he could think of.
“The other English teachers are probably hassling you because they want you,” Riddock counseled. “Sexually.”
“I’m sure that’s it.” Kimberly wished it were as simple as that. Then she’d just have to walk around the English department dressed like Lil’ Kim on the cover of “La Bella Mafia”—suspenders with no shirt, a look on her face that dared anyone to call her on her fashion choice—to win the grants she needed.
* * *
In class the morning of the exam, Joe Burkhart made conversation, trying to loosen them up, asking people how they had spent the weekend before.
“WEEKEND LAST,” Javon signed, “I GO TO BAR. SEE BAD LOOKING WOMEN.”
The football players busted up. The women frowned and met each other’s disapproving glances. Kimberly had spent Saturday with Chance, watching three Luis Buñuel movies in a row, as she’d promised. Chance had played the scene of the eyeball being stabbed in “Un Chien Andalou” over and over. She wished she could have gone out with the football players instead, to the bar where people threw the shells of free peanuts on the floor.
Kimberly took the exam so that she could measure her progress. As Joe signed sentences for them to translate, traced shapes in the air for them to draw, and signed a floor plan of an imaginary building for them to write down, she became utterly lost. If she were getting graded she would have flunked. She let out a burst of laughter under her breath at the thought. It felt like being in one of those test taking nightmares that other people had—Kimberly had never had one, as school used to be her ace. Riddock, two desks over from her, enjoined himself to succeed. “Come on,” he whispered to himself, “I know this.”
* * *
The next day, the academic adviser told Kimberly that four of the football players had been accused of cheating on the exam.
“That is bullshit,” Javon insisted when he learned he was one of the accused. He signed the expletive for emphasis, placing his right arm on top of the left arm, elbow to hand, making bull horns by extending the curled index and pinky finger of his right hand, and waving the fingers of the left hand rapidly underneath. “It was them stupid old ladies who did it.”
The academic adviser brought the accused into his office one at a time. He seemed experienced in such matters. He spoke to Kimberly first. “Those women don’t even know the football player’s names,” she told him. “How could they know whom to accuse?”
“Did you see or hear anything?” he asked.
“Riddock was talking to himself under his breath a little. Some of them were signing to themselves so they knew how to answer the questions. But they kept their hands under their desks. Nobody did anything improper.” She fumed at the thought of Cecily, who would have fit right in at Renata’s gatherings.
The women had fingered Javon, Taggert, Riddock, and Strickler. Kimberly imagined them huddled around the football media guide, flipping through the scouting reports until they recognized a picture. After the individual conversations, the academic adviser told the ten football players and Kimberly to assemble in the conference room for a meeting. Kimberly sat pinned in the far corner of the room packed with male flesh, worrying that she’d let them down, that she’d be kicked off the team.
“Hey, Tag,” Javon shouted across the table to Taggert, “So I go over to study at some girl’s house, and I see your clothes there.”
The guys looked up, with interest.
“What?” Taggert asked.
“You saying that wasn’t your hat?”
“Oh, you see,” Taggert said, turning to the cornerback next to him. “Now he’s saying my hat. First he said my clothes.”
“I’m just saying, your apparel. You never see my apparel at some girl’s house.”
“That’s because you take them back to your house.”
The guys laughed. As the parade of Javon’s beautiful women ran through Kimberly’s imagination, she felt a pang, then rebuked herself for it. She thought of her pop-up window about boasting in Beowulf, which informed the website user that in Anglo-Saxon society, boasts were, in essence, vows.
While the laughter faded, Riddock turned to Lamont Strickler, contemplating him, the only quiet one in the bunch. “I saw your mom the other day when she visited,” Riddock said. Strickler nodded. Javon had told Kimberly that Strickler was occasionally overwhelmed by a bout of homesickness, and his mother would come up from Memphis and cook everyone a vat of ribs drenched in her homemade barbecue sauce.
“She doesn’t look like you,” Riddock said. “Are you mixed?”
“Fool, look at him,” Taggert said. “Mixed with what? His mom’s black and his dad’s black as hell?”
The whole room started hooting and the table quivered from the guys’ powerful belly laughs.
“Quiet!” Kimberly shouted, standing up suddenly.
The room silenced and they looked over to her.
“These are serious allegations,” she said. “Don’t you know that?”
“Lil’ Kim’s right,” Javon said, “We could get kicked out of summer school, plus we got to pay back the stipend and tuition.”
Everyone started to complain and hiss. The academic adviser entered the room, and they all began shouting at once.
Riddock shook his head. “I need this language class to graduate. I’m not going back to Texas with 130 credits and no diploma.”
“Man,” Strickler said, “There’s no way I could pay that stipend back.”
“Who else has been accused?” Javon wanted to know.
“Just us four,” Taggert said, “and we weren’t even sitting near each other.”
“I’m taking one for the race,” Riddock insisted. “Those ladies knew they couldn’t just accuse three black guys of cheating. So they threw me in.”
“Hold it now,” the adviser said, raising his hands. “Nothing has been proven. I’m going to meet with your teacher and the director of the ASL program this afternoon. For now, Coach Brutlag wants to talk to you.”
Brutlag, the linebacker coach, was the only member of the team’s staff who was not then vacationing in a tropical isle. He had a massive head and a sun-blasted face.
“Listen up, men,” he said. “This is going to be quick.”
The guys sat up in their chairs and drew their knees closer together.
“As members of the football team, you are representatives of this university. The outcome of this case hasn’t been decided, so from now on, I want you to behave so that you are above reproach. You got that?”
They nodded in unison. Brutlag rested his black Nike on a chair, and leaned his elbow on his leg, his polyester coaching shorts stretching taut against his bulk.
“No talking in class at all,” he continued. “These old bags are riding your asses. Don’t give them any excuse to accuse you.” He stared at them with an intensity in his ice blue eyes that frightened Kimberly. “Be above reproach,” he repeated. “Now I’ve got to make my tee time. I don’t want to be called in here again.”
He left. The room remained silent for a moment.
“Tomorrow,” Javon said, “Let’s go to class early and take the front seats from those ladies.”
The guys started to grin.
“I could take that test again,” Riddock said, “and nail it, just like last time.” He pounded his fist on the table. Everyone began to shout, rallying for battle against the five women with spider-veined legs. Kimberly now knew what it felt like to want to ram into a tackling dummy, grunting and growling, or to gird a sword on her thigh and rush out to claim the head of a foe.
That afternoon when Kimberly was about to leave work, the academic adviser called her into his office. He told her that he’d met with the teacher and the director of the Sign Language department. “The director trusts those grad students,” he said. “He didn’t think they would falsely accuse anybody of cheating.”
Yeah, Kimberly thought, grad students are always so honest and forthright. “The guys didn’t cheat,” she said. She waited for him to fire her, digging her fingernails into the moist flesh of her palms.
“Well, there’s no way to prove the allegations,” he continued. “Joe insisted on this point. So the guys are getting off with a warning. You’re going to have to keep them in line for the rest of the session, though, because they won’t get a second chance.” He looked at her sternly, issuing an unspoken reprimand.
Part Five
“You’re still under scrutiny,” Kimberly told the football players the next day before they headed from the athletic building to the classroom. “No talking in class, period. And from now on, Joe is going to have a hearing assistant sit in class and listen to you during the test.” She thought of Beowulf’s words, fate often saves an undoomed man when his courage is good.
The football players moved faster than Kimberly had ever seen them as they hustled over to the class building. They arrived ten minutes early and sat in a phalanx, filling the front two rows. When the women arrived, they stared at the guys, as if willing them to move, and then picked their way to the back, having difficulty finding a path past the big men.
“I can’t see back here,” Kimberly heard Cecily stage whisper, “They’re just huge.”
Cecily went up to the front of the room before class started and scribbled a note to Joe on a piece of paper. He looked at it and then stood, gesturing for the hearing monitor to address the class. “Professor Burkhart wanted me to come in and explain this in English so there are no misunderstandings,” the monitor said. “I’ll be sitting in during tests from now on. And there is to be no talking, period, or it will cost you your grade.” NO TALK, Joe signed.
Joe opened the door for the monitor to leave, taking back control of the classroom, his eyes fierce. Kimberly wondered if he was angry that the accusations had forced him to use an assistant during tests, as though he couldn’t run the class himself.
Joe abruptly turned to the board and wrote “COMPETITION,” across the top, the chalk squeaking as he finished the word. He turned to them and signed the instructions. They were to split into three teams and form lines. When he gave the signal, the first person in each line would draw a notecard with a word on it, which they would have to sign to the next teammate in line, who would write the word on the chalkboard.
The women immediately formed a line, and Joe smirked at them, as if to let them know that he expected no less. The football players sorted themselves into two groups, the four accused cheaters sticking together. Kimberly sat at her desk, scribbling some notes about the new ideas for research she’d had after the first fallow weeks of summer, on the bonds of kinship among warrior athletes. But Javon drew her into the back of his line. She looked at him and he smiled. “WE NEED YOU,” he signed, the last word ending with his index finger pointed at her. Joe raised his hands, then dropped them, and the first person in each line raced to the stack of cards while the second person rushed to the board.
The smell of chalk dust filled the air and the game moved almost too quickly for Kimberly to keep up with it. Strickler drew a card and performed the sign for “STRONG,” and Riddock scrawled the word on the board. They drew “YELLOW” and “TOY” and “GUEST.” Kimberly was terrified that she’d get words she didn’t know how to sign, but she got lucky, drawing “BALL” and “HOUSE” and “WOMAN.” Joe walked among the students, correcting the positioning of their hands. The guys were pumped, racing up to the desk for the card and pounding back to the end of the line so that the floor of the room shook, and on one turn Riddock clipped a desk, sending it crashing to the ground.
Kimberly glanced at the grad students’ progress. Cecily tried to draw a card, but couldn’t pick it up, and had to lick her finger to grip the paper. She signed “CAT,” and the woman at the board wrote “TIGER.” Cecily shook her head and signed again, stroking whiskers with her fingertips, while the woman at the board shrugged and shook her head. The room was silent except for the sound of the football players’ pounding feet and the occasional squeak of chalk across the board.
Joe flicked the lights on and off to signal the end of the game. The two teams of football players had lists of words twice as long as those of the grad students. Joe checked the words on the board against the cards, crossed off a few wrong answers, then took up Javon’s hand and the hand of a center. Joe paused, then threw Javon’s arm in the air.
The accused cheaters went nuts, in silence, jumping and slapping each other’s hands, bumping chests, celebrating the way they were not allowed to in the end zone. Kimberly applauded in ASL, raising her arms and fluttering her hands like windblown boughs, and Riddock lifted her into the air, her skirt flaring as she rose. A squeal escaped her, a sound she hadn’t made since she was playing four square on the elementary school blacktop. She covered her mouth with her hand, and as she looked down over the classroom, she imagined the revelry that followed Beowulf’s triumphant return with the head of the beast on a spear.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Cecily said. “It’s just a game.”
Joe pointed at her. “NO TALK,” he signed, then picked up his grade book to mark down her infraction. She threw up her hands.
Joe flicked the lights on and off to calm them down. Everyone settled into their desks, but Kimberly could feel the exuberance from the victory still coursing off the players, Javon nudging Taggert and miming swishing a basketball through a hoop. As Joe signed, Kimberly could picture them all assembled in bright Heorot, its rafters rising above, good King Hrothgar thanking Beowulf after the defeat of two monsters for fostering friendship and peace between peoples, the King’s Danes and Beowulf’s Geats. And the young warriors lining the mead-hall benches, rapt, clad in beaten-gold mail, their glinting helmets and swords at rest as they vowed to serve each other unto death, the courage-giving weight of warrior’s armor on their shoulders.