Martha Cooney

My friends came over to hang out at my Brooklyn apartment on a night I should have been studying for a teaching exam. The test was coming up and the study guide in my bedroom corner still had a healthy spine. 

 

I signed up for the exam after a classmate in my grad school program told me I could get out of one of the required science courses by taking a state test. I’d already taken one science (I told you before about the class pets — R.I.P.) and it wasn’t on my vision board to take another one. This would save a thousand dollars in student loans and besides, I loved getting full credit for math or science by doing less math or science, or even better, doing something other than math or science. I did it in college (paper on Lewis Carroll for Ideas in Math), high school (paper on education reform policy for Chemistry), and grade school (thirty-five-page science fiction story instead of getting gritty on outer space stuff – what’s it called? Astronomy?) 

 

I like science in real life (trees; vaccines) but I can’t eat dry facts off a slide with no context. Why couldn’t I get credit for applying scientific knowledge out in the world? I kept a jar of rocks on my shelf and I went fishing one time. If I didn’t understand physics, how come I knew when I had the exact right angle and amount of seconds to stick my foot in the subway door before it closed?

 

I found the list of tests that would count for credit and quickly signed up for Natural Sciences because — as above – I like nature. Then I browsed online for a study guide. I found the official guide, put out by the testing company, for sixty-five dollars, and another version, put out by a random brand, for eleven. 

 

I mean, which one would you have picked?

 

The eleven-dollar study guide arrived. I put it on top of a stack of textbooks, coursepacks, and my official glossy-photo Sex and the City: The Movie hardback. 

 

I had six weeks until the test. I was teaching all day and taking a full load of (non-science) courses at night. The study guide waited. I didn’t want to start the relationship, because then I’d be in it. I knew we would do the dance of negotiating how much time we spent together, that once I had more information about its inner life I would feel even more guilty for ignoring it, that we’d both be frustrated at short stolen hours where the connection could only go so far, that there would be passive-aggressive comments and tears, and that the guide would be unhappy through the whole situation and it would all drag on until the test and the breakup. Why get involved when I wasn’t in a place to give someone what they deserve? I would rather spend time with my friends. 

 

Our friend group had all met working at the Washington Heights Y. Danny was the assistant to the director. On his lunch breaks he played stickball on the roof and when his boss wasn’t around he read the New York Times at his desk, holding it up high in front of his face like a comic strip dad.  

 

He got fed up with the job. One day the director came in and found Danny behind the sports page broadsheet with his feet up on the desk. 

 

“You were late this morning,” the director said, angry.  

 

“Yeah,” Danny said. 

 

“And why did you leave early yesterday?” the director asked. 

 

“Cause I felt like it,” Danny said. It was beautiful.

 

“You’re fired,” his boss said. “Get out.” He drove him out right in the moment like a farmer chasing a goat out of his garden.  

 

Danny kept in touch with the crew. We were a mix of transplants (Bolivia, Texas, Philly) and native New Yorkers (Queens, Washington Heights, the Bronx) and the locals knew the good places to go. We watched the Phillies-Yankees World Series at Coogan’s pub (Danny wore his Mets jersey), went to the neighborhood hilltop karaoke bar (on the way out, Danny jumped on the back of an early-morning newspaper delivery truck before it went down the hill) and ended nights at our favorite Greek diner at 4 a.m. Every Saturday and Sunday after a night out with everyone I’d wake up in the middle of the day feeling alarmed and tell myself I needed to make time to study for the test. 

 

I didn’t. Now I had less than two weeks. If I didn’t pass I’d have to borrow another thousand dollars and sit through another semester of boring to finish my program on time. I had already invited everybody over for tonight, so I planned to kick off the big study sprint tomorrow, with all day to really get stuck in and knock out half the material. That would set me up nicely to finish the rest next weekend. 

 

I felt good about the plan and went to gut avocados for a huge bowl of guacamole. Danny threw pebbles at my second-story window to announce that he and his buddy Bobby were here. The others rolled in with Coronas and the good kind of cantina tortilla chips. Because he was tall and could reach where I couldn’t, Rick, who worked at the Y front desk, started changing light bulbs around the apartment. Patty, who worked in the office, read out the number of her best friend –  who was having a hard time with a mechanic – so that Rodger, who ran the gym, could prank call her to say stuff about her car. Bobby took the guacamole bowl and ate out of it on his lap. I made a Funfetti cake from a box. Around midnight Rick said my bathroom needed cleaning and he and Danny went for it. I made another Funfetti cake and Bobby and Danny ate it out of the pan while they sat on the couch under a knitted blanket. It was after 1 a.m. when Danny suggested we watch The Shining. He had brought the DVD. 

 

I couldn’t handle scary movies. I had, when I was younger, gone home and cried in bed after scary movies. But that was a long time ago. The Shining was a classic. I was with friends. We had knitted blankets. 

 

We started the movie. After we made fun of Danny for having the same name as the little kid character, the next two hours and twenty-three minutes gradually traumatized my mind, body, and soul. Jack Nicholson’s character slowly went mad and typed over and over on his typewriter: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. The ghost twins in the hallway; the bloody corpse in the bathroom; REDRUM on the mirror – I was losing it. Coming after you. Alone. Hiding. Breaking down locked doors. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 

 

Also – to reiterate – The Shining clocks in at two hours and twenty-three minutes. 

 

It was 4 a.m. when it ended. I campaigned for everyone, or anyone, to stay over. There was couch space; both my roommates were gone and their beds were available; it was late. Everyone stumbled out; waking up in a borough that’s not your own is a bad way to start a day. I was alone in the apartment and terrified. 

 

I turned on all the lights, got into bed, clutched my sheets and cried. I texted someone in another city; they weren’t awake. I couldn’t go to the bathroom because I was afraid of what was in the tub or the mirror. Jack Nicholson was coming to get me. I stayed awake in fear until the sun came up. Then I slept until 3 p.m. 

 

I woke up hungover and psychologically bruised. Corona bottles were on every surface and every light in the place was still on. My spirit could not face the study guide. The day was shot. I got cream cheese on an everything bagel and told myself it was okay to move the big kickoff forward. I could do some stuff during the week and finish next weekend.  

 

Over the next two weeks I played on my softball team, danced at Beauty Bar (salon by day, club by night), ran on the Hudson, worked on my novel, read Harry Potter, and went to Coney Island to watch the Cyclones and eat a hot sausage sandwich. A low-lying panic rode in my pocket everywhere I went. The longer I waited to study the more I resisted. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 

 

The all-nighter is an art; some of my finest work has been done at the last minute. Managing the components is critical, though. Once in college I stayed up all night to study for a history final with my friend Evan. At six a.m. we went to McDonald’s for breakfast. Evan drank an orange juice and said he was going to go home to nap before the exam. I thought that was risky, stayed up, and went to take the final at nine a.m. I didn’t see Evan. On my way out of the exam he arrived at the door looking stunned. He’d overslept. 

 

I figured the best thing to do was to take the day before the science test off of work, so that I only had to extend into the all-nighter if I got desperate. It was nine a.m. I made coffee, sat down, and opened the study guide for the first time. 

 

Did you also think that Natural Sciences was just nature? Guess what? It’s everything. Biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, astronomy. I had to re-learn, or learn for the first time, all of the basic facts of all of these areas, in twenty-four hours. 

 

I tried to zoom out. What did I already know from high school science? I remembered that in freshman biology I sat near Tom C., who stole a frog corpse from the dissection lab and put it in someone’s locker, and Tom B., who read Seventeen magazine (“Gotta keep up with girls’ minds”) behind his textbook while he drank a Hi-C juice box. 

 

There was also sophomore chemistry. Our teacher was a class act and wore calf-length skirts and stockings, and her name was Mrs. Oberholtzer. It was around the same time as the nineties Budweiser commercial where the frogs croaked from one side of the swamp to the other. The guys in class waited until Mrs. Oberholtzer was doing something on the board with joules, and then you’d hear, from four different regions of the room, the low bullfrog voices of sixteen-year-old boys in a perfect-pace trust exercise where they spontaneously took roles: “O…” “...Ber…” “Holt…” “...Zer.” It was beautiful. 

 

Nothing else had stuck.

 

I did remember that in biology, in between Tom B. and Tom C., I had sat and drawn comics in my notebook to interpret what the teacher was saying and to amuse myself – protons talking to neutrons; enzymes battling cell walls. I did cartoons in other classes too, and song lyrics, to remember stuff. 

 

I looked at the book and made a decision. The only way – the ONLY way – I could get through this information and remember it would be if I made a comic book. I picked up a blank notebook and wrote on the first page “Natural Science: A Musical Adventure in Cartoon Form.” 

 

The study guide wasn’t that great. There were typos and some questionable grammar. But it rolled out the facts for every category, and I worked my way through and made cartoon drawings and speech bubbles in my notebook. 

 

***

PLUTO: Why does everything always revolve around HER? (glares at SUN)

MERCURY: Shut up, Pluto. You’re not a planet anymore. And you’re ugly. 

PLUTO: (cries)

 

***

TIM GUNN glares, disapproving, at WHITE BLOOD CELLS.

TIM: It’s after Labor Day!

 

***

ATOM: Floozy!

LOOSE ELECTRON: (cries)

 

***

PARASITE (deadpan): I gave you malaria. 

 

Maybe I should go to medical school, I thought. Then I could make comics to study. Everyone said med school was so hard, but they just didn’t know my method. 

​

My roommate came home from work and asked how it was going. “Great,” I said, layering swoop lines for Einstein’s hair. 

​

I knew I needed to move faster, but I was having fun. At 6 p.m. I was only a third of the way through. The quality of the study guide was getting worse. Things were repetitive and seemed out of order, with a random fact from one category showing up somewhere else. The further I got into the book, the more disorganized it got. I reached a page that grouped purebred dogs, albinism, the scientific method, and the phases of the moon. 

​

There are many phases to the moon, the guide said, and you should know them for the test. For more information, check www.wikipedia.com. 

​

Wait. What? I’m here for you to tell me the phases of the moon. That’s what this relationship is. 

​

I got a weird feeling in my stomach, like confirmation that your boyfriend is cheating. Could it be that the study guide wasn’t just badly edited, but that it was … something even worse? I’d already put the time in. Where could I go? I drew a werewolf for the moon section. Sometime after midnight I knew I wasn’t going to make it through the second half of the book. I had forty-nine pages of comics. 

​

The next day I went to work, left in the middle of the day to get the train downtown for the test (already running late), sat on a delayed train, and got to Water Street with only five minutes to get to the test center. Usually when I had to run to get somewhere on time I stopped and sacrificed five seconds to put a good pump-up song on my ipod, because running on the streets of New York meant I was in my own montage, so I wanted “Free Ride” or “Carry on My Wayward Son” playing in the background while I sprinted past my audience. Look at that girl; she must have an interesting life! More than once when I did my running montage toward an arriving train I swiped my Metro card wrong because I was rushing, crashed into the turnstile, and got bruised.

​

This time I did not sacrifice five seconds for a song, and I made it to the test center with one minute to spare. The girl next to me in the lobby asked what I was taking. 

​

“You only needed three credits? Why did you take the Natural Sciences test?” she asked. “That’s worth six credits. You could have picked just one science, like biology.” She seemed upset for me. “You did twice as much work. Didn’t you look at the information?”

​

I hate when people say Didn’t you look at the information? almost as much as I hate when they say What’s your five-year plan? 

​

I started the test on the computer in my private cube. Within the first ten questions I realized something was very wrong. None of the questions had been covered by the study guide. The entire test was on stuff that was nowhere in the eleven dollar study guide, and the eleven dollar study guide was full of stuff that was nowhere on the test. The Venn diagram overlap was about ten percent. I felt the way Evan looked when he overslept. 

​

I used guesses and tried to remember things I learned in third grade. When in doubt I chose answer C. The study guide had been useless. The work on my comic had been useless. I had blown my chance, just to save fifty-four dollars on a crap study guide and to lay awake in my apartment terrified of ghosts. I hacked through the test like Jack Nicholson hacking through the goddamn bathroom door at the Overlook Hotel. It was all the same bloodbath. 

​

To pass the test you had to get fifty points out of a possible hundred. It was a low bar and I had no idea if I would make it. A man in the hallway handed me a sheet of paper with my score. It was fifty-two.

​

I got out before they could change their minds, and walked to the subway on rubber band legs. I was horrified at what I’d almost done to myself; it felt like I had almost gotten hit by a truck. Somewhere in the background, though, I was impressed that I’d pulled a passing grade out of my armpit. When I got home I put the study guide in the trash right away so I could forget any of this had ever happened. 

​

At the end of the semester I had a party at my apartment; someone overflowed the toilet and flooded the bathroom and Rick and Danny got in there all enthusiastic with the plunger. I still have my comic book, if you’re in medical school and need tutoring or whatever.