Educating Esmé (2 page)

FAIRY TALE FASHION SHOW

Is fur still “in” for the Three Bears? What is Cinderella wearing to the ball this season? Miss Riding Hood still sizzles in red (ask any wolf), and Sleeping Beauty is a cutie in her pj's. The Paper Bag Princess makes a statement without saying a word, while less is more for the
Emperor's New Clothes (boxer shorts)! The possibilities are only as limited as local theaters, closet costumers, good sport volunteer models (adults and children), and our collective imaginations!

Carnival Games
Some ideas:

• 
Ugly Duckling Match. Find the numbers that match on the bottoms of bobbing plastic ducks in a “pond” (plastic tub).

• 
Three Billy Goats Gruff Toss. Three beanbags through holes in a thematically painted board wins.

Bookmarks make good inexpensive prizes. What else? Let's brainstorm!

Bake Sale/Book Sale
How about Frog Prince cupcakes (with green food-colored frosting), Thumbelina finger sandwiches, Giant's magic rings (doughnuts) or cookies from Red Riding Hood's basket? Again, volunteerism and imagination are our only limitations.

I only meant that last line to be cheerleading. I was carried away with the idea of infinite possibility. The same sense of infinite possibility, from the sour expressions on the faces of my cohorts, that would compel someone to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. All that is really necessary, after all, is a little “volunteerism and imagination.”

Another gross thing at the meeting: Lillia, a teacher from Italy, about fifty-five years old, was chatting along and came to the word “conspicuous,” which she pronounced “copiscuous.” Big deal!

But no. Ms. Coil made a hand gesture of a cascading waterfall beneath her chin and enunciated, “ConSPICK-you-us.”

Lillia just looked.

“Con-SPICK-you-us,” the vice-principal repeated, clearly wanting Lillia to follow. Wow! Isn't that audacious! I could have smacked her across the nose!

“Yes,” Lillia nodded and continued what she was saying. When she came to that word again, she said, “Co-PISS-cue-us.”

Congratulate me—I didn't laugh out loud.

What's so hard about saying thank you? Mr. Turner never says it.

He tells me to come in early and tells me to stay hours late. Then he calls me up at 11:30 at night. “I have a principal's meeting tomorrow. What do I think?”

I hardly know what
I
think when it's nearly midnight, let alone what
he
thinks. Since he's my boss, I spew off some educational theory that's still fresh in my mind from college. The next day, I go to the meeting with him. When he gets up to speak, it's the exact words of a twenty-four-year-old coming out of a fifty-year-old mouth. Everyone claps. P. T. Barnum would have been proud of such a fraud.

This calling me up late at night has happened more than it should. Sometimes he calls to say, “So, I did a pretty good job today, huh!” Other times he calls to tell me how stupid he thinks the other teacher he hired is, asking, “Why can't she be more like
you
, Cordell!” (Of course mispronouncing my name.) I don't take this as a compliment at all. Who's to say he's not calling her when he's done calling me, saying how stupid
I
am?

If he were the sort of person who ever said thank you for anything, I would say, poor man, lonely man. People who don't say thank you, people who ask “What do I think?,” people who call people on the phone after a twelve-hour workday, people who talk behind people's backs, well, maybe there's a reason they are lonely. But I think I cured his late-night hellos.

When the phone rang at 11:30 the night before last, I let it ring. The machine answered it, he left his name. I set my alarm clock.

At 3:00 a.m. my alarm clock rang. I called Mr. Turner.

“Oooh! Did I wake you up?”

He grunted in reply.

“I'm
so
sorry. It's just that you called me so
late
. I knew you wouldn't call me so
late
if it wasn't terribly important. So I thought I had better call you back.”

Last night I had a phone-free evening.

M
R
. T
URNER KEEPS
asking this woman in her twenties to type stuff for him. Really big stuff, like school improvement plans that are as thick as the width of my thumb, and always at the last minute. She kept coming
in and doing it, but finally she said, “Mr. Turner, I've got two kids at home. I had to leave a pot of macaroni and cheese on the burner. If you're going to keep calling me in to do these big projects, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask to be compensated.”

“That's all right.” He snatched the pile of papers out of her hand.

“I don't mind doing it, Mr. Turner, but you've got to understand, it's very difficult for me to drop everything and . . .”

“I understand.” His voice was even, too even. “It's all right. It's fine. We don't need you. You can go ahead home.”

“If that's the way you feel,” she said with a shrug.

After she left, Mr. Turner flew into a rage. “Compensated! Compensated! After all I've done for her!” He went on and on about owing favors and one hand washing the other and I'll wash your back you wash mine and reciprocation and how he surely would have compensated her but now that she has asked she can just forget it. He kept asking me, didn't she have the nerve and how dare she. I wanted to ask him how dare
he
, and wasn't he embarrassed to call a woman away from her family without offering to compensate her in the first place, but he was in such a fury about what she owed him for some reason that I was too nervous to speak up. So I just said, “Well, she had macaroni and cheese on the burner.”

He started his tantrum at 5:30, and I didn't escape from his soliloquy until 7:30. My ears were ringing. As I lay in bed, I thought of quitting. I feel sure now that I am not working for a good person. I thought of Ismene's warning: “You are a very gifted teacher. Don't teach. Be an actress instead.” I tried not to think about it.

I fell asleep remembering my last day in the class I taught with Ismene. I had made cookies for the children, brightly iced and sprinkled, in the Moravian shape of a hand with a heart in it. When the children walked down the hall to exit that day, they were all waving these cookie hands at me. Good-bye, Ms. Esmé! Good luck, Ms. Esmé!

Ismene Siteles. Fifth-grade teacher.

I didn't think I would like her. She seemed so traditional.

“Are you married?” I asked after she asked me.

“No. I have enough children to take care of without a husband.”

Gaunt and graying, she pulled ears and yelled a lot. “Absorb!” she would command. She was startling to watch, and that's what I was there to do: Watch. One hundred hours of “observation,” that's the training requirement before student teaching.

On the second day, though, she squinted her penetrating eyes at me and crooked a finger, posing as if she were casting a spell. “
You
,” she accused. “
You
are
ready
.” That was the end of “observation.” For several hundreds of hours, she let me stand in front of the children and read. Ask. Count. Laugh. Yell. Do magic tricks. Teach.

She was a harsh critic. She brought me to tears. Then she dried them. She urged me to forgive myself at the end of each day, that no single thing I could say
would break a child . . . or make a child. Still, she taught me not to be too flippant, that, as a doctor cures what ails the body, I must strive to diagnose the roadblocks to learning. Thanks to her generous advice and allowances, I enter my profession with excitement instead of trepidation, and the understanding that, really, I have no right to indulge in a lack of confidence. It would only interfere with the task before me.

Ismene taught me basics: Ignoring bad behavior as long as you can stand it. Maintaining quiet lines. How a soft voice can be more effective than a loud voice. Starting out with positive comments to parents before lowering the boom. Waiting patiently for children to answer questions.

She also made me laugh.

“Where's your homework?” she asked a boy.

“Suck my dick,” the boy replied.

To everything the boy replied, “Suck my dick.” “Suck my dick.” “Suck my dick.” Every day. “Suck my dick.” Ismene ignored it.

Finally, we were delivering the class to gym.

“Get in line.”

“Suck my dick.”

She pulled him out of line by his ear. “Come with me, Esmé. I need a witness.” I followed.

She dragged him into the boy's bathroom. They faced each other. His shoulders lifted and fell in his puffy nylon jacket as he breathed forcefully, indignant about his treatment.

“Drop your pants!” She commanded.

“
What!
You can suck my dick!”

“That, sir, is
exactly
what I intend to do.”

His mouth fell open with an audible plop. They stood facing each other without moving for an eternity.

At last she spoke. “All year long I've been listening to you: ‘Suck my dick! Suck my dick!' Why would you ask for something so ridiculous at school? From your teacher? Either you are completely crazy or you really want me to ‘suck your dick,' as you have been insisting. So drop your pants.”

“No,” the mortified boy quavered.

“Then in the future,” she warned in a sinewy, deliberate, almost cheerful growl, “be careful what you ask for. Or a certain old lady just . . . might . . . give it to you.” She leaned down and opened both her eyes as
wide as they would go and grinned with all her sharp teeth.

I don't know how many weeks it was before color returned to that boy's face. I know he didn't say “Suck my dick” for the rest of the year.

She was my mentor.

I'm confident because I'm prepared.

I will kick pedagogical ass in her memory.

Mr. Turner got the idea that the businesses in the community should make contributions that could be used as incentives for the children when the new school opens. So we went together to the local business strip, Hollywood Avenue, to solicit donations. Most of the businesses there are pawnshops and smelly fried chicken huts, so I had my doubts about the success of the whole endeavor. Mr. Turner stood imposingly over six feet tall. He had donned an elegant pinstriped suit and his hair glistened. He had a prewritten sales pitch, which he enunciated mightily to each store owner as if he were reciting from Hamlet.

None of the owners of the dilapidated stores had anything they could contribute, though the owner of one of the pawnshops liked my necklace. The hairdresser at the hair weave salon locked the door when she saw Mr. Turner coming and shook her head angrily when he knocked.

I tried to make pleasant conversation. I asked him how he came to be a principal. He said the Vietnam War was going on and he felt a black man would be stupid to fight for this country, so he went to college instead. He changed his major from drama to administration so they wouldn't draft him. Then he asked if I was going to marry my boyfriend. I said I felt that was kind of personal, and that was the end of pleasant conversation.

All in all, a stupid day.

One great thing is that I get to see the school built from the ground up. The architects take us around. It's so exciting to think that soon the rooms will be filled with children! I am going to teach the fifth grade.

Today I got to see my classroom for the first time. It has a nice wide window ledge and shelves beneath so I can make displays. Only two things bugged me. One, there were four bullet holes in the window perpendicular to the chalkboard. Mr. Turner says the window will be replaced by the time the kids arrive. The other thing, which is a really weird, ungrateful thing, is that it didn't smell like a school, which is usually a kind of combination of kitchen cleanser and fish sandwiches. I love smells, and that smell in particular is one of my favorites. When I think of being a teacher, I always think of smelling that smell to my heart's content. Some fringe benefit! It just smells like sawdust and drippy pipes right now, which has its charm but is not the karma I am looking for. It makes me think, in a secret corner of myself, that I didn't pick the right school to work at. But that's just silly!

There was a meeting at the community center so everyone could meet the teachers of the new school. We were introduced one by one and then stood up behind
Mr. Turner. When we were all assembled, it was apparent that there was a disproportionate amount of twenty-something slender white girls wearing short, albeit professional, skirts.

“Is this the fucking Miss America Pageant?” one of the teachers whispered to me out of the side of her mouth.

There were thirty-five of us, out of over eight hundred applicants. I helped Mr. Turner sort through the résumés. Some were handwritten and looked totally mediocre. Mr. Turner insisted we still contact everyone to be interviewed. “You can't tell if they have something to offer just from their résumés,” he insisted. Tonight I figured out what it is that we all might have to offer.

Sorry I haven't written. A lot has been going on, as you can probably imagine.

Setting up my classroom, at long last, was very exciting. I put up a bulletin board with a big red schoolhouse shape
without
windows (those would come
later) that said, “New School . . . You're What Makes It Special.” There was a tree covered with apples. Each apple had a number on it.
Thunk, thunk, thunk
, it was so gratifying, stapling it to the board. Then I had to arrange the chairs. I noticed other teachers arranging the desks so children would be sitting in cooperative, small groups. I kept thinking that that was politically correct, I should do it like that. But somehow it took all the romance out of the first day of school, when you're supposed to feel very formal and alien, a day when your thoughts are very new and personal. So I decided to be more traditional and put the desks in rows. Besides, I want to seem really mean for a while. I bought black pointy lace-up boots, like a witch, to wear for the first day, to add to the dramatic effect.