14 Stories (7 page)

“Some picnic upstairs,” I say.

“And you see? I bet like most people here you thought we've the cushiest job in the school. What are you doing for the summer?”

“They must have driven that poor woman I replaced right to the hospital she's at.”

“No, she was pretty effective. Always a strong lesson prepared and perfectly timed so they didn't get bored. And most of her playful darlings she had a certain charm with or through a stream of letters and phone calls home got them right under her thumb.”

“When I was a student in the seventh grade—”

“Dearie, all of us except the youngest teachers say that.”

“Right? P.S. 9, just a few blocks from here. We used to sit with our hands folded if we finished a lesson before anyone else. And after school we'd cross the street if we saw any one of our teachers coming, only afraid they might stop and say hello.”

“Things change. Civilizations and schools notwithstanding. Like this place was the model school of the city when it opened up. Visiting dignitaries used to be invited, and come.”

“Now the kids buttonhole me for quarters and cigarettes if I see them outside. And one last Sunday cursed me out to his friends when he saw me entering this nice neighborhood bar. ‘Hey look, there goes my wino teacher drunk.'”

“The last week shouldn't be too bad with most of them cutting or out on class trips. And if you think it's cuckoo now you should've seen it last two days last year. Hundreds of them across the street and with smaller forces in back in case we tried to escape, and they battered us with raw eggs and ice-cream balls.”

“How'd they manage to throw ice-cream balls?” But three o'clock's come. We line up behind the teachers and paraprofessionals to place our room keys on the key rack and clock out for the day.

At home on my bed I fantasize about Judy Louis. It's the following morning and I see her walking on the opposite sidewalk on her way to high school. She's wearing a short skirt, man's white T-shirt and on her shoulder is one of her leather bags. I cross the street to buy one of my special candies but more to see her up close. No, better it's the day after tomorrow. Friday, around quarter past three, whole weekend ahead of me, and I'm leaving the same grocery store I saw her approaching that time with her girlfriend. It's a hot day, near ninety, though the humidity's quite low. In my grocery bag are two six-packs of ale and beer, items I buy in that quantity almost every Friday on my way home from school along with my once-a-week loaf of unsliced black bread and a hard cheese. The store's front door is closed, as just the other day I overheard the dairy man yell to a woman to please don't be keeping it open as they don't want to be air-conditioning the whole outside. But I keep the door open for her and as she passes I say “Hello, Judy.” She stares at me, surprised I know her name. I say I didn't want to startle her, but I used to teach at 54. She says “I'm sorry, I don't recognize you, what did you teach?” The dairy man might say “One way or the other, in or out, but shut the door.” I say to her “Would you mind? In's more comfortable,” and step into the store, switch the package to my other arm. “You wouldn't remember me as I was a per-diem sub, but I had your class a few times. Right now I'm a typing teacher for a month—remember Miss Moore?” “Oh God—Miss Moore. Two years and I almost forgot. I had the other one—what was her name—with the very correct manners and bawdy asides and horselaugh?” Or else she could have had Miss Moore and recalls the story I've heard about how she got order in the class. “She'd stand halfway up the middle aisle tinkling by the end of its ivory handle this little bell, which she said she got in India forty years ago, till eventually everyone stopped what they were doing and stayed silent till she spoke. ‘Class,' she'd say, if she didn't say children. ‘As much as I love each and every adorable one of you, I estimate you took a minute twenty seconds of your Friday free time away by just now taking a minute twenty seconds too long.' But I actually learned how to type with all my fingers from her, so you could say if it wasn't for Miss Moore I wouldn't have my part-time job.” I ask what she does when she isn't working part-time and she says going to a special city school for theater and dance or even rehearsing a small part with a theater or ballet group. I mention the regularity of my seeing her and she says lots of times she's wondered herself where I'm off to every morning and finally decided it was a graduate school I attended, because of all the books I carry, or some other kind of school I teach at, though she never figured for J.H. 54. “The books are for my own enjoyment during my free and preparation periods, or if the class cooperates, then during the study periods I try to give them whenever I can. Now I can't as I have this program for a month and if I don't keep them busy all the time they'd be climbing the walls.” She asks what happened to Miss Moore and I mention the operation and she says she liked her and hopes everything turns out all right. I say something like I don't want to be detaining her from her shopping or if she has to be anywhere soon, but if she doesn't then why don't we have a coffee somewhere nearby? She says “Coffee's too hot for today, even tea.” I suggest a soda or beer, though I don't drink soda, and she says “Sure, either's fine,” and we leave the store. Outside I say I ought to leave my groceries in the store and pick them up later instead of lugging them around. Or else I'll just place the bag under the checkout stand before we leave, telling the cashier I'll reclaim it in an hour. Then we head for the bar three blocks away. I'll tell her what that student called me last Sunday when he caught me entering this same bar. And how many of my students ridicule me for my so­straight behavior because I won't dance to their records with them, even if I tell them I'd love to dance with them or by myself if it weren't for the possibility of another teacher walking in. How one afternoon I just sat at my desk and let the class throw erasers and paper planes at me, as I'd given up on trying to control them and lost the will, wherewithal or whatever it is to fight back. How on the hottest most humid day of the year this week I told the kids to just sit quietly and don't type and by all rights they should be dismissed to find relief in the park and public pools and sprays, and for the first time my assistant principal walks in, face and clothes soaked, and says “I don't know what you think's going on here but I've been explicitly ordered by the principal and she by the district supervisor to see that every teacher maintains disciplined classes and structured lessons till the last day of the term.” How without being detected I've tripped several boys to stop them from running around the room, how others have told me to go on and teach when they had their arm around a girl's neck and hand on her breast, that I've been dubbed ‘pigeon head' because of my receding hairline and ‘fish lips' because of what they think are my excessively large lips. How one day about twenty boys from a local high school burst into the room, turned over all the chairs and unbolted tables, threatened to beat up all my students and knife one boy in particular and toss all the typewriters into the street and the teacher after them, and then as swiftly left to pull the same prank with another class on the floor while my students cringed and sobbed behind me at the far end of the room. Or how on another day, but we reach the bar. She could say how come I've no nice stories about my students and I'd say because they'd be too unamusing to tell and I'd think uninteresting to hear. She studies dance, quit high school this year, lives with her mom. I explain why I'm only a sub. That I've also been living with my folks for three years to cut down on my rent and help out my mother with my ailing dad. I ask if she'd like to go to the Modern tonight. Only the sculpture garden's open but we can get beer or wine there, espresso with snacks. I've an artist's pass I acquired for ten dollars and a fake letter from a real art gallery saying I've shown there and for an additional two-fifty got a second pass for a nonexistent wife. She says she'd love to go. We return to the store. She says would I prefer meeting her upstairs or in front? We part, we meet, we sit on the sculpture garden steps drinking foreign beer. Before we separated at the store I said eat lightly if you have to eat at home at all tonight as we might as well have dinner after the museum. She says I'm the first teacher she's gone out with other than a dance instructor who's her own age. I say I dated many students when I was a student but so far all the single agreeable teachers and college teaching aides I've asked have turned me down. Do I say that? We say goodnight. I say I'd like to kiss her now but sort of feel funny about it and she says I don't see why we shouldn't. We do. Three shorts and a long. I pick her up at home the following night, meet her mom, am offered a drink. Judy sits beside me on the couch and we want to hold hands but don't. We have dinner out or see a film. We walk, we talk. I say if I had my own apartment would she come back to it with me now and she says why not? I say I've an old car and would she like to go camping next weekend and she says that sound like fun. I've no tents but two sleeping bags that can be zippered up into one. We make love in a big bag. Later in the summer we go abroad for two months. When we return we search for our own apartment in the old neighborhood so I can still help out with my dad and mom. We're married by the end of the year. By the end of the next year we've a child. A girl or boy and it's conceived by natural passion and delivered by natural childbirth and I'm there in the delivery room with her, clasping her hand when I'm not drawing her in labor and giving birth, and then sketches of the cord being cut and umbilicus being sewn and child held aloft and washed if they're still held aloft and washed, and bundled up by the nurse, suckled by my wife, sleeping and weeping and caterwauling behind incubation-room glass, other fathers and grandparents making faces at the new infants, the room, window view and various objects in this room where Judy sleeps and her three roommates. And we're both very happy. We're considered an ideal couple. We love each other very much. I continue to draw, engrave, assist my parents and substitute teach.

My mother knocks on my bedroom door. “I'm setting a place for dinner for you tonight, and don't say no.”

“Not hungry now, ma, thanks.” I exercise, shower, dress. It's still light out. The folks are at the dinner table. “Sit down,” dad says. I wash the cooking utensils that are in the sink, kiss my parents on the cheek and go to the park, sit by the lake, draw an abandoned rowboat, jog for a mile, watch the carousel close and the tail end of a women's softball game, draw a catcher's mitt and mask on the grass, buy sweet creamy pastries for my mother, dietetic cookies for my father, go to that same grocery store for fresh green beans and a four-pack of stout. Would I speak to her if she were here now? “You wouldn't,” a friend recently said about something else, “because you never want to see your fantasies end,” but I don't think he's right. I wouldn't speak to her without her speaking to me first. She could become repulsed or afraid if I did and I could become embarrassed and suspect in the store I've been shopping at for three years. She'd have to drop something and I could stoop to pick it up. Or stretch for something out of reach and I could say “May I help?” After I got whatever it was she reached for or dropped she'd say thank you and I'd mention the school we're both familiar with and maybe a conversation could then begin. It could continue in the street and that neighborhood bar where I'd invite her for a beer. If she came into the store now I'd only look at her a few times, maybe get into her aisle under the pretense of searching for an item I never do find or for a bottle of chili sauce or vinegar the household could always ultimately use, but no actions if she didn't elicit them more unguarded or venturous than that.

Next door's the corner candy store I go into to get the afternoon paper for my dad. He'll gripe I'm only tossing good money away by buying such a rag but read it from beginning to end including the larger ads. She's at the magazine rack in back, scanning the magazine covers while gnawing off the chocolate remains of an ice­ cream-pop stick. I open the paper I'll buy, look at it as if checking a movie timetable, say huh-huh, and nod while folding the paper in two and pore over the many choices of my favorite candy brand. She's taking a magazine off the rack. There's a flavor I've never seen anywhere before called pink grapefruit. She slips the licked ice­cream stick into a back pocket and turns a page. And tangerine, which I think I had in the sour-fruit assortment and found either too tart or sweet. She's coming front to pay for the magazine and I feel which of my pants pockets has the change. Her bell-bottom white denims have brown buttons for a fly. She isn't carrying a shoulder bag but extracts a wallet from one of the two breast pockets of her denim workshirt. Sandals I've never seen, woven colorful cloth for a belt that's half-tied, but hair, face, expression and walk all the same. Everything else the same. “Excuse me,” I say, “but would you mind if I took a brief look at the table of contents of your magazine?”

“I'm really in a rush and they've plenty more copies back there.”

“It's just because they are in back and out of the way that I asked, though I don't see why I should be such a laze. Thanks.”

“Sure.”

I go to the back.

“A dollar,” the proprietor says and she pays up and leaves. I find the same magazine, one I could always read, good author in it and poet I've mostly liked, many reviews, elegant ads for places and goods I could never afford, pay for it and the newspaper and pink­grapefruit candy and wait for my change. Her voice is deeper than I thought it'd be, unaffected, without regionalism or unpleasant twang, pitch or tone and she did seem in a hurry and genuinely sorry she couldn't help me out.