Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth

years
passed.
    Mr. Caine had all of us bigger kids finish the
school year with a play by Shakespeare. The youngest of our group,
the ten- and eleven-year-olds, had read Julius Caesar . The
rest of us, twelve and up, were split between Macbeth and King Lear . Since not everyone had read each play, we went in
groups, giving class presentations on the plot and characters and
answering some basic questions of interpretation or historical
background. I presented on Macbeth , though I had read both
of the others in my spare time. As I said, I was like that back
then, reading and studying whenever I could.
    Looking back, the plays other than Lear were
straightforward enough, and the theme tying them together was
accessible enough even to adolescents—kings gone bad, corrupted by
personal flaws and bad decisions, turned into familial and national
tyrants, bullies, and murderers. But there was something unreal
about all the plays, and as often as I kept things to myself,
sometimes I could find a voice for my frustration, as I did that
morning. “I don’t understand why we read these, Mr. Caine. The
plays, they’re all set in a world even before yours. They talk
about kings and queens and empires. I can look all those things up
in a book, but they’re not part of our world. I mean, there are
even witches and ghosts in these books—those never existed, they’re
just made up. None of them matter to me. Nothing in these seems
real.”
    I had read enough books about mean teachers—I’d
already read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on my
own—to know how far out of line I might be considered, and how
cruel and wicked people could be. But I had known Mr. Caine my
whole life, and I had as little fear with him as I had with my dad.
I knew he loved good questions—not frivolous or nit-picky ones,
though he would patiently answer those, too—but challenging ones,
ones that got to the why of what we were reading or
discussing.
    He just nodded, then looked out the window. “I see
your point, Zoey. Maybe I shouldn’t have picked all plays about
kings. I should’ve seen how the very concept of government—let
alone something as ancient as kingship—would be too distant and
alien for you.”
    It was how he always answered a question, I realized
later—by agreeing with the questioner and admitting to being wrong.
The only person more disarming with rhetoric was Milton, and both
men had always held me enthralled. “But let’s think if that’s the
only thing these plays are about. Zoey, the play you read, Macbeth , what was it about? I mean, the main character was a
bad king, but what is it about, besides what a bad king is
like?”
    I had read enough on the play to know the basic
answers. “Ambition. Power corrupts. Revenge. What’s appropriate for
each sex.” There were some snickers. “Some people think he wrote it
in support of the Tudors.”
    Mr. Caine smiled. “Everyone—ignore that last one!”
There were chuckles from the people who were paying attention.
“Reductionism, Zoey? I’m shocked!” I almost smiled too, but held
back, as it was another of the things—like my hair or skin or
voice—that I found especially ugly and awkward that summer. “As
though I would assign you something that was just about some bit of
historical trivia, as though a work’s beauty could be boiled down
to something so mundane! But the other themes—yes, they’re all in
there. And maybe we’re blessed with not having to worry about those
today. Nobody has too much ambition, or too much power. We’re all
just struggling to survive. So maybe those themes are irrelevant to
us, too. But I think you missed one theme, Zoey. It’s biggest in Lear , but it’s in Macbeth , too.”
    He had me caught without an answer. He was so good
at that, but it was never mean—if I’d had the answer right to hand,
he would’ve praised me for that, and if I didn’t, like now, he’d
coax me along. He didn’t want to prove me wrong, he wanted