Ms. Hempel Chronicles (6 page)

Ms. Hempel thought that parents would be, too. They were supposed to be vigilant. They were supposed to reprogram the cable box, listen to lyrics, sniff sweaters, check under the mattress. Or, at the least, distinguish between Ms. Hempel’s prose and that of a seventh grader. She had read every one of the anecdotals herself, yet she could not account for the lapse.

Some were panegyrics, plain and simple: Adelaide is without a doubt the most outstanding French student I have ever encountered in my 36 years of teaching. Some were recantations: Please ignore my phone call of last week. Matthew is no longer disrupting my class. Some suggested publication: Elliott’s five-paragraph essay was so superb, I think he should send it to Newsweek. Some recommended immediate acceleration: Judging by her excellence in all areas, 1 think that Emily is ready to take the SATs, and maybe start college early.

Some anecdotals did everything at once.

Dear Melanie Bean,

lam writing to you about your son. He has been doing exceedingly well in English class. He has gotten a perfect score on every test or quiz we have had in English. He is completely outscoring, outtalking, outparticipating everyone in the class. I look forward to spending my time elaborating his mind in his field of expertise. I would like to consider moving him up to the eighth grade level, which I think would be more suited to his ability. Even though he would miss Spanish every day, 1 think that Spanish is an inferior classfor any person of his mental state, and is simply

ruining his skills. I haveframed many of his works and find them all inspirational, especially his poetry. William is an inspirational character and 1 will never forget him. I suggest that you encourage him to use his skills constantly. Sincerely,

Beatrice Hempel

Will Bean looked nothing like his mother. He was small and impish and pale, and had assumed the role of a friendly, benign irritant, someone who pops up from behind desks and briskly waves. His greatest joy was a series of books about a religious community made up of mice, voles, and hedgehogs. They had taken the Benedictine vows, and created a devout but merry life for themselves. Will frequently alluded to them. He produced a radio play in which he performed all the parts: the sonorous voice of the badger abbot, the tittering of the field mice, who were still novices and had to work in the monastery’s kitchens. He pestered Ms. Hempel into borrowing a tape deck and making the whole class listen to his production. In anecdotal terms, he could be described as whimsical, or inventive, or delightfully imaginative.

Ms. Bean, however, was tall and gaunt and harried. When Ms. Hempel saw her standing outside the school’s gates, she was swaddled in bags: one for her computer, another for her dry cleaning, for her groceries, for Will’s soccer uniform. It was strange, how clearly Ms. Hempel could picture her students' lives—Will had tae kwon do on Tuesday afternoons, and every Wednesday night he spent with his dad—and how murky their parents' lives seemed by comparison. All she could see in Ms. Bean was evidence of a job, an exhausting one.

“Do you have a moment,” she said.

Ms. Hempel said of course.

"I wanted to speak with you about the assignment.”

Would she find it deceitful, and dishonest, as Mrs. Woo did? Or maybe, like Mrs. Galvani, she had telephoned all the relatives, even the ones in California, to tell them the wonderful news. It was unlikely, though, that she loved the assignment, thought it original and brilliant and bold. Only Mr. Radinsky seemed to feel that way.

What Ms. Bean wanted her to know was that she felt the assignment to be unkind. Or maybe not unkind. Maybe just unfair. Because she had been waiting a long time for someone else to finally notice what she had always known about Will. And then to discover that it was an assignment, merely.

The disappointment was terrible—could she understand that?

Mr. Dunne, her college counselor, was the one who first noticed the discrepancy. Impressive scores, mediocre grades. A specialist was consulted, a series of tests administered, and a medication prescribed. The bitter pills, her father used to call them. The prescription made her hands shake a little, but that wore off after a while. And then: a shy, newfound composure. Her mother entrusted her with the holiday newsletter. She wrote film reviews for the university paper. She had a nice way with words, a neat way of telling a story.

To her ears, though, her stories sounded smushed, as if they had been sat upon by accident. None of the interesting parts survived. Yes, her father flashed the headlights, and yes, she waved at him before she stepped inside. Those details were resilient. Not these: how she waved glamorously, and smiled radiantly, how the headlights heralded the arrival of a star. How her shadow, projected onto the snow, looked huge.

“That was beautiful,’ her aunt said to her when she returned to her pew. “I can see Oscar doing just that—making sure you got in safely.”

Beautiful was not what she intended. Her story was not about safety and concern and anxious attentions. It was a tale of danger, intrigue; a story from the days before her medicine, the days of their collusion, when they communicated in code—click, click—as true accomplices do. When they were still plotting to prove everyone woefully mistaken. This was the story she wanted to tell. Then how did something altogether different emerge? Something she didn’t even recognize as her own. Even her father—her coconspirator, her fan—had been changed into someone she didn’t quite know. A kind and shadowy figure, sitting in the car. Benevolent. Thoughtful. Considerate of others.

It was the Annual All-School Safety Assembly. The police officer looked short and lonely in the middle of the stage as he reeled off the possible threats: flashers in raincoats; razor blades in apples; strangers in cars.

Ms. Hempel wanted to raise her hand. Wasn’t he forgetting something? He hadn’t even mentioned the predators she dreaded most. And wasn't it all supposed to sound more cautionary, more scary?

The grisly details that the officer omitted, Ms. Hempel s imagination generously supplied. The black and shining van, the malevolent clowns, their wigs in sherbet colors. The dim interior, the stains on the carpet. Doors that shut with a rattling slam.

Ms. Hempel clenched her muscles. Terror flowered darkly inside her.

In the very back row of the auditorium, the eighth grade sat and squirmed. Zander, upon completing a drum solo, crashed an invisible cymbal. Elias drew a picture of a small, slouching boy on the back of Julianne’s binder. Jonathan, with the toe of his sneaker, battered the chair of the seventh grader sitting in front of him. Here they were, arrayed before h restless, oblivious, vulnerable, all of them.

“Come on, guys.” Mr. Peele, microphone in hand, glow, ered at the eighth grade. “This is serious.”

An assertion that prompted the entire back row to explode into laughter. The eighth graders were banished to their homerooms. As they exited the auditorium, banging into everything they touched, Mr. Peele, his palm clamped over the microphone, instructed the homeroom teachers to finish off the job. “And don’t forget to remind them about Safe Haven," he said, but the homeroom teachers were already walking out the door, rolling their eyes at each other. They had inherited yet another mess, like the teaching of sex education, the chaperoning of Trip Days, the organizing of canned-food drives and danceathons.

Ms. Hempel’s class, jostling their way back into the homeroom, looked decidedly pleased with themselves. “Were missing French!” Sasha announced. Victoriously, they slammed their backpacks down onto the desk-chairs. “How many more periods until lunch?” Geoffrey asked.

They had no idea of the danger. “Don’t you realize,” Ms. Hempel cried, shutting the door behind her, "all the terrible things that could happen to you?”

The class regarded her coolly. The whole assembly, they explained, was not for their benefit. They weren’t small or cute enough anymore. They were too wised-up. “Want some candy, little girl?” Elias said in a cooing voice. Who would fall for such a stupid trick? Probably even the fifth and sixth graders knew better.

“I mean,” Sasha said, “were not exactly the ones to worry about.”

“I know!” A chorus of agreement. And then, the cherished

complaint: no one seemed to have noticed the fact that they were, virtually, in high school and thus fully capable of handling their own affairs.

“Haven’t you heard,” persisted Ms. Hempel, “about the clowns? Who kidnap you? Who drive around in vans!”

“Oh, Ms. Hempel," Julianne sighed. “Were fine. Really.” “Can you imagine,” Sasha asked, "a clown taking off with Jonathan Hamish?”

The class turned and looked at Jonathan, who had peeled the sole off his sneaker and was now trying to insert it down the back of Theo's shirt. The logic went: in the unlikely chance that Jonathan could be swayed by the promise of bottle rockets and lured into the back of a dark and fusty van, he would exhaust the clowns before anything creepy might happen. The kids chuckled at the thought: the clowns slumped over, wigs askew, wearing the same dazed, disbelieving expression they sometimes saw on the faces of Jonathan’s teachers. Meanwhile, Theo wriggled valorously.

Ms. Hempel confiscated the sole.

“What is Jonathan, or any of you, going to do when the clowns sneak up behind you and clobber you over the head with a tire iron?” she asked. “Or stuff a chloroform-soaked towel underneath your nose, and you pass out? Dead to the world? What are you going to do then?”

"They do that?” Geoffrey asked.

; “For real?” Julianne asked.

“Yes!” Ms. Hempel said. “I read it in the newspaper.”

The eighth grade looked appalled. Ms. Hempel felt appalled, at the enormity of her lie. Generally speaking, her lying was of the mildest sort, only because she couldn’t do it very well. A genetic failing. Her father was a terrible liar. “Did you get in touch with the insurance man?” her mother would

ask, and he would answer, “Yes!” in a confident way that made it quite clear he had not. Once, when he picked her up from school, more than forty-five minutes late, he had glared at the dashboard and growled, “Emergency at the hospital,” even though his damp tennis shorts in the backseat were letting off a most powerful reek.

But he was scrupulously honest about important things. When faced with a difficult question, he never lied or dodged or even faltered. “Toxic shock syndrome,” he once explained to her, “occurs when a woman leaves a tampon or an IUD inside her vagina for too long, allowing bacteria to gather. The bacteria then causes an infection that enters her bloodstream and can, but not always, result in her immediate death.” Mastectomy and herpes were described just as clearly.

It was a model she admired. “Sodomy,” Ms. Hempel now said to her class, “is what’s happening in the back of those vans. And though sodomy is a word that can be used in reference to any sort of sexual intercourse, it most commonly refers to anal sex.”

They seemed to have a good understanding of what that was. Roderick made a joke about taking a shower and having to pick up a bar of soap off the floor. The class laughed warily. They shifted in their desk-chairs.

“The clowns do this to you while you’re unconscious?” Theo asked.

“Exactly,” Ms. Hempel said, and the kids fell silent. The other clowns, the ridiculous ones wearing wigs and clutching candy, had been replaced: these new ones marched through the homeroom swinging their tire irons, waving their towels, unbuckling their pants.

“So do you see why we’re scared? Why we want you to be careful?”

The kids nodded. They seemed to have gone suddenly limp. Ms. Hempel felt horrible.

"But don t worry!” she said. "There are stickers everywhere. You’ve seen them. The blue ones? With the little lighthouse on them.”

"Safe Haven,” said Sasha dully.

“Right!” Ms. Hempel said. "If you see that sticker in a store window, you know that you can walk inside and they'll take care of you and call the police and call your parents.” “You mean if the clowns try to clobber us,” Zander clarified.

"Or if anyone strange approaches you,” she said. “Anyone who makes you feel uncomfortable.”

"But Safe Haven doesn’t work!” Gloria said. "When this gross guy was following me home from the bus stop, I went into Video Connection, and the girl there didn’t even know what I was talking about.”

“A gross guy followed you home?” Ms. Hempel asked. “He kept singing, Tou are the sun, you are the rain, really quietly, just so I could hear. You know that song?”

The other girls squealed softly in disgust.

“When did this happen?" Ms. Hempel asked.

"It happens all the time!” the girls cried out, and like a flock of startled pigeons they seemed to all rise up at once. Didn’t Ms. Hempel know? Weirdness was lurking everywhere: behind the bank, holding a broom; on the subway, grazing your butt; at the park, asking if he could maybe touch your hair. What book are you reading? What grade are you in? The girls bounced up and down in their chairs, seething, commiserating, trying to outdo each other. When I was walking to school. When I was visiting my cousin. No, wait! Listen: When I was, like, twelve.... ■

Homeroom discussions always seemed to end this way The girls in a glorious fury, the boys gazing dumbly at the carpet. What would possess a clown, Ms. Hempel wondered to kidnap one of these beautiful girls? So lively, and smart and suspicious. Such strong legs, from kicking soccer balls and making jump shots. So full of outrage.

The boys, though: brash and bewildered, oddly proportioned. Some of them were finally beginning to grow tall. They wore voluminous pants that hung precariously on their hips. They grinned readily. During the winter, when it was very cold, they refused to wear their coats in the yard: We get hot when we run around! they said. Their T-shirts flapped against their thin arms; their chests heaved. The ball rarely made it into the net, but they didn’t seem to mind. It was all about the hurling and the frenzied grasping and the thundering down to the other end of the court. And even though the girls were always plucking at Ms. Hempel’s sleeve, demanding that she listen, it was the boys who tugged at her heart, who seemed to her the ripest for abduction.