‘You want me to do what?” I asked my driving companions.
“Talk about your love life,” said Mark, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “You know, just get up and tell an ambiguous story so that they can interpret.”
“Oh, is that all?” I retorted.
I was on my way to Hope House, a residential treatment program in Redwood City that provides alcohol and drug rehabilitation to 16 women who have been released from local correctional centers. As part of the regimented schedule during their six-month stay, the women attend parenting, nutrition and job-skills classes—and humanities courses taught by Stanford professors. Last fall, I joined Mark, a senior philosophy major, and Marianna, a coterminal master’s student in education, as a tutor for the program. The three of us spent our Friday afternoons at Hope House, helping with the reading and writing assigned earlier in the week by the instructors.
Mark and Marianna, who both had tutored in past years, explained that the idea behind telling the story was to bridge the gap between practical experience and academic interpretation, and to encourage more involvement from the class. The women in Hope House were intimidated by reading Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill and Virginia Woolf, and panicked at the sound of the word “thesis.” We hoped to show them that they did in fact know how to interpret a text—a story told aloud. If all went well, they’d realize they knew how to construct a thesis and develop an argument.
“How about if you go first so I can see how it works?” I suggested to Mark. I, who had been affectionately teased in my frosh dorm about my reserve, rarely discussed such details with my closest friends. How could I share them with relative strangers? I made several excuses, trying to worm my way out of it. Mark and Marianna, however, were implacable.
The next week, I told the class my version of a (fairly universal) story of platonic flirtation, stopping at a point that left the guy’s intentions as ambiguous as they’d seemed to me at the time. The women were quiet for the first few minutes, but soon broke in with a series of questions: “Did he go to your school?” “What does he look like?” “What did you wear?” “How often did you see each other?” “Could he drive?” “What color were the flowers?”
Increasingly self-conscious, I at one point denied I’d been trying to impress him. Rosemary, who’d spent previous classes with her head on the table fast asleep, leaned forward and looked squarely at me. “Honey, you were wearin’ heels!” she said. “Not trying to impress him? Don’t even try to tell me that!” I looked at her, grinned and shrugged agreement. “Okay, yeah,” I said, and everyone around the table laughed.
Marianna wrote down their observations, then organized them into three paragraphs and a thesis that summarized their views. Interpretations ranged from “Girl, he’s dogging you, get away from him!” to “He seems like he’d be a better friend—leave it that way.”
The class members had so many questions, pieces of advice and stories of their own that I just sat back and listened. Their questions were pertinent, their logic direct, their suggestions blunt and their humor soothing—and I realized I was learning as much from them as they were from me. (These profound musings, however, mingled with an unholy glee as I imagined what the story’s protagonist would think if he knew how fiercely these 16 women had scrutinized his every move.)
As the women developed an outline, I could see them moving toward a shared understanding of the story. “I didn’t think of that,” several said. Gradually, they began to see the relevance of the exercise to their lives: not only the parallels between my story and some of their own, but the way that writing could provide them a measure of detachment with which to analyze situations and gain new insights. I heard one of them say, “I wish I could do this with my life,” and I told her how the journal I’d kept for years served exactly that purpose.
I think that afternoon I was unofficially adopted as a little sister. The storytelling dissolved much of the hesitance they—and I—had felt before. Soon we were talking about our hometowns, families, attitudes toward school, passions and plans. They began to tell me how much they missed the partners or children they hadn’t seen in months and how they might enroll in community college to “get back on track.” My preconceptions of former substance abusers and inmates metamorphosed into multifaceted views of each individual.
In a presentation at the end-of-quarter dinner, each woman received a certificate for two units of credit from Stanford’s continuing-studies program and a book. When Rosemary got hers, she faced the room and said, “I just want to say thank you. My family doesn’t finish anything, and I finished this. So thank you to the professors, and Mark and Marianna—and cutie over there.” As I left the restaurant, several of them hugged me goodbye, and one of them admonished, “You stay away from those boys, you hear?”
Sheena Chestnut, ’05, is from Spokane, Wash.
