Testing, testing ...
20 August 2011 05:46 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Today I am taking the GRE . The last time I took this was probably in … 1991? Twenty years ago. I took the train to Mom and Kevin's place in Wilmington and she later dropped me off at the testing site which was in Newark or in Philadelphia, where I sat with a bunch of other children in the high-ceiled room of a library, us with our scratch paper and our pencil marks and our dim light and our nervousness. Five years before, I had taken the SAT – my main memory of that is that it was scheduled the day after a Halloween party and I was tired and slightly hung over, but it went fine, because my brain was young and supple and accustomed to tests.
In the fall of 1985, along with every other junior in my high school, I took the PSATs. Except that I had to leave early for my ultrasound appointment, so that they could check on the age of the fetus, which I fudged the whole time, holding on to my lie until the pregnancy’s sad end six weeks later. All I remember about this pretest was the auditorium, my unexplained secret, the way we had to talk to the guidance counselor about my early dismissal without actually telling her the reason I had to have a doctor’s appointment right then. Now I wonder if I really have to have it then. We were in emergency mode by that time and skipping one half of the PSATs probably seemed unimportant.
I remember the before, sometimes a bit of the during, but I hardly remember the aftermath of these tests. Generally, I did ok. But here I am, over 25 years from a math class, knowing that I am going to totally screw that part of the GRE up. I’m worried and not worried about it at the same time. It’s like the logic midterm, knowing that I am going to toss myself over the side of a cliff and knowing that there is little I can do about it.
I failed the midterm, but luckily almost everyone else did, too. This is where my connection to my fellow philosophy students, all young men who were at CUA on a special scholarship where they were in the seminary (none of them became priests) while simultaneously getting a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy. They used their power (not that they had a lot of it – these were tough years for these guys) to toss the results of the test out. It was true, our instructor was an ethicist, not a logician, and often would write long proofs on the chalkboard only to have a student point out a flaw in his formula, necessitating an entire rethink. There was a lot of crumpled paper in that classroom, a lot of groans. In the end, I got a C.
Last night I went to bed before ten p.m.. I read my escapist romantic book, A Town Like Alice, and I dreamed of phone calls that didn’t go through and children waiting for absent parents. In the last dream, I was in an elevator that was fluffy with loose insulation. I took it down to the basement, to the place of secrets where the walls were ripped away, showing their vulnerable insides. I watched the men working. I worried about their lungs, about the fibers floating in the air, about the way we contain the past. I waited for a sign that it was time to go back up again.
From the prompt "Surprise, surprise!"
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Edited slightly beyond the 12-minute mark.
Image by randomduck. This picture makes me homesick. The Childe Harold is no longer there, but I spent a lot of time in that basement bar in my 20s. J's cousin was a bartender there. My husband and I had at least one early days date there (I even remember the conversation) and a coworker took me there for a final beer after I quit my last full-time library job. Zorba's, the Greek restaurant to to the right of the Childe Harold, was where I went for an (illegal) Guinness on my first or second night in DC in the summer of 1989, drinking, eating, and reading under a Dupont-blue night sky, watching the people go by.
I need to visit. It's been too long.
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