Sven Birkerts: ALL THAT WAS NOT THERE... • Cleaver Magazine

Sven Birkerts
ALL THAT WAS NOT THERE…

When I was in the eighth grade at Berkshire Junior High in Birmingham, Michigan, I had a Spanish class with Mrs. Whittaker. I woke up today thinking about that class, though more than fifty years have passed and that whole period of time, me with it, has slipped into that penumbral zone of memory, which seems to extend its reach as time goes by. Why this morning? I didn’t know at first. I don’t think I dreamed about the class, though now I think it may have come to remind me of something I seem to keep forgetting.

Mrs. Whittaker was thin, with thin legs and a thin keen face. She was Spanish, so Whittaker was probably her married name, though as the semester wore on it somehow became clear that there was no Mr. Whittaker, only a teenage son named Tolo who she mentioned fairly often.

Mrs. Whittaker did not sit, though the rest of us had assigned seats. She moved around in front of her desk, made sharp, rapid movements with her hands, and spoke quickly, only slowing down when she used Spanish phrases. There was, I still recall it, an edge of challenge in her tone as she picked us out, one after another, to repeat a sentence or answer a question.

My assigned seat was behind and slightly to the left of the seat where S. sat. She and I had gone through grade school together and we seemed to have a watchful, lightly mocking rapport.

I thought S. was very pretty and studied her profile for most of the hour. She felt this, surely, for from time to time she would turn and flash me a warning look, though I had no idea what she would be warning me about.

The feel of that room, the afternoon light pale on the walls, the nervous crackling energy Mrs. Whittaker gave off as she paced back and forth—it all felt so vivid this morning. Again, I don’t know why, but I do know how it moved into my thinking as the day went on. Because I finally couldn’t help but play it forward, filling in all that was not there in the classroom moment, but which took on depth and a sorrowful resonance in the years that followed.

It was some time later—I had moved on to high school—that the news came that Mrs. Whittaker’s son Tolo had been killed in a car crash. I remembered how fondly she had talked about him, how teasingly. Always with that amused shake of the head. The rascal.

I went to one high school and S. to another and six years passed until that Fall afternoon on University of Michigan Diag. I was sitting on a bench and saw her walk past me—the familiar profile. There was a sudden thudding silence like in the movies. I got up and chased after her and, proverbial long-story-short, we reconnected. Barely in our twenties now , we fell for each other and several years later, after graduation, we moved out to the coast of Maine together.

We’d saved some money and were able to live, if frugally, in sight of the ocean. I worked at writing but with little success. S., always artistically inclined, took up watercoloring and within a year—it happened for her—was showing work in local galleries. I felt I was being left behind in some way, and as time passed, our paths diverged. Finally, I moved back to Ann Arbor, while S. stayed on in Maine.

I’ve not seen her for almost fifty years, now though I follow her on Instagram and marvel at her paintings, her gallery.

But today, who knows why, I’m still in this morning’s moment, still in that room, there in my seat just behind her. I keep the feel of the light, Mrs. Whittaker going back and forth in front of the blackboard. Usted, ustedes… And S. in profile, paying attention. I had to grasp it again—it’s so easy to forget—that there is no moment, no period of time that stops in itself and from which we move on, that is not transfigured again and again until there is no longer anyone left to hold the memory.

Sven Birkerts is the author, most recently, of Speak, Memory, a reflection on Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, in IG Publisher’s “Bookmarked” series. Former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, Sven Birkerts lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. His book of essays The Miro Worm And The Mysteries Of Writing will be published in October by Arrowsmith Press.