Look Again

She rubs the end of her nose with her fist. “Maybe a little. You don’t come across as someone who hands over ideas easily.”

“I love sharing ideas.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t mean so people will tell you you’re smart,” she says. Ouch. “I mean, you seem like you’d hold on to the best stuff for yourself.”

I feel a quiver of unease. That’s how I look to her?

“You think I’m arrogant.” It’s not a question.

She answers anyway. “It’s your defining characteristic.”

“Not fair.”

She laughs. “Okay, maybe your bow-ties are your defining characteristic. But the arrogance comes a close second.”

“Is that why you didn’t answer my messages?” I ask.

She shakes her head. Then she nods. “Maybe. Kind of.”

“You’re tough on me,” I say. Can she hear an apology there?

“Look at it as an opportunity for you to improve.”

“Do you have any different suggestions for my improvement? Anything that seems less like you hate me?”

“Would you take my suggestions?” she asks.

“Of course.” If I wait to answer, I might reconsider. Would I take her suggestions? What does she know about what I do?

“I think you have too many people on stage at the same time.” She is looking past my shoulder toward the window.

“But the crowding shows—” I start to explain.

She shakes her head and sighs. “See? You already know everything.”

I make a zipping motion over my mouth and gesture to her, forcing myself to give her time to say what she thinks. Even if she doesn’t really know anything about staging a play.

She continues. “If you break up the stage, mark off different physical spaces for certain scenes and arguments to take place, and then let the speakers arrive on stage in turns, when they leave the audience will be able to move from beat to beat with them.”

I can see it in my head, now that I’m listening. She may never have done a play before, but she is a professional at composition. She keeps talking, and I pick up my notebook and start writing things down. Her ideas are unconventional, but so is the play.

I realize that she’s been talking for quite a while when my hand cramps around my pen.

“You have interesting ideas,” I say. They’re great ideas, but I don’t want her getting cocky about changing my play.

She shrugs. “I want to help make the good stuff better.”

“Me, too,” I say. “And I have more ideas for you to use in your classroom.” We did enough deep diving into revisions of my work. Now I can suggest ways for her to improve hers.

“You won’t hold back the good stuff?” she asks, grinning. She’s teasing me. I love it.

“I will give you all the best stuff.” It feels like a promise.

I talk for a minute about posting objectives for lessons and tying every assignment to a skill. Her fingers fly as she writes it all down.

When she finishes typing, I say, “Of course you know about the cookies.”

“What about the cookies?”