Goodbye to Yesterday

"Well, Calvin, you’re a pretty good looking guy. Maybe you can charm the hell out of her. Okay. Let’s add a few more questions to this. Maybe you’ll have a chance to make a ‘C.’ I’ve read the book before even though I didn’t review it in her class."

We took several minutes and rehearsed more questions and answers on the novel. One o’clock in the afternoon was approaching.

"Boy, I’ll tell you," Dee Dee said. "That Sister DuMaine thinks she’s slick. Old, wrinkled, white woman, sitting in her office between classes, sipping her liquor, getting just tipsy enough without anybody knowing it.

"If she could reincarnate herself, she’d probably be a whore, you hear me? A hoe’!"

"I don’t believe that," I said.

"I ain’t lying. You Southern Baptist Negroes are all naïve. Y’all don’t know anything about Catholics. Let me tell you," she continued. "My home girl had a work study job in Bennington Hall last year, and still does now. Part of her job was to empty wastebaskets, clean off desks, run errands, and stuff.

"It was nothing to see liquor bottles and mouthwash in Sister DuMaine’s desk drawers. She sips it out of a coffee cup. She always keeps a pot of coffee going on a little corner table as a decoy. Hell, her favorite drink is ‘Southern Comfort,’ something she can drink straight or with the coffee."

By then, some other students sitting on the long convex bench within earshot of Dee Dee, joined in the laughter.

"You would think that the average self-respecting woman would avoid a book like From Here To Eternity. Not her! She’d rather discuss it with you guys. Ever notice that more guys review this book than girls do?"

She held up the yellow and black book. "I’m telling you, it gives her a chance to live vicariously as a whore."

"Vicariously?" Dwayne asked. "What you mean by vie-care-ree-us-ly?"

"I know what that means," I volunteered. "That’s like if a man was a ball player, see? And he didn’t go, or couldn’t go, as far as he wanted to with it. Then he has a son, and he puts his son in sports early, gives him a ball as soon as he can walk. And on up the ladder, he pushes the child to success.

"When the child is successful, the man is successful. He relives his sports life through the child. That’s called vicarious."

"That’s right," Dee Dee concurred.

"Dee Dee, I don’t want to get with you vicariously," Dwayne flirted. "I want to get with you for real!"

"Well, Dwayne," she paused. She calmly lifted the blue, floppy brimmed cloth hat off his head, where he had been wearing it playfully on the back of his Afro with frontal hair sticking out from under it, and she placed it level and right: "You play your cards right, and we’ll see what happens."