Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher

by Monica Nolan

  “What did happen?” she asked.

  “Oh, Miss Craybill confiscated the ouija board and Linda lost town privileges for a week. School life is a series of tempests in a teapot. I hope you won’t find it too dull.”

  “I’m sure I won’t,” Bobby replied. I’ll be too busy figuring out this teaching business, she thought to herself.

  What had Miss Craybill said during their brief interview? “My Games Mistress needs to demonstrate discretion…impeccable behavior…responsibility as a role model….” The imposing phrases blurred in Bobby’s brain.

  A final twist in the road brought them in sight of a pair of massive stone pillars. A wrought-iron gate stood open and a black-painted iron arch between the two pillars spelled out the words “Metamora Academy” in elaborate wrought-iron curlicues. The station wagon jounced through the opening.

  “Welcome to Metamora!” said Mona Gilvang.

  Chapter Two

  Miss Watkins Weighs In

  “You’re telling me to be a gym teacher? At a girls’ high school?” Astonishment had snapped Bobby out of her usual lethargy and she was sitting straight up in her blue cotton hospital robe, eyes wide and jaw hanging open.

  It was June, three months before Bobby stepped off the train in Adena. June, when the as-yet-unheard-of Miss Fayne was exchanging vows with her fiancé. June, when Bobby was trapped in Bay City General Hospital, plodding her way hopelessly through the round of doctor’s appointments, massages, and physical therapy treatments. June, when the sunny weather, the gay cotton dresses the girls wore, the warm smell of mown grass all mocked Bobby as she contemplated the ruins of the dreams she’d dreamed and the plans she’d made. Her accidental fall had shattered them as surely as it had shattered her right humerus.

  “You majored in physical education all through college,” Miss Watkins pointed out, in that reasonable, encouraging tone that drove Bobby batty.

  The June heat made the hospital vocational counselor’s tiny office unbearably stuffy. A fly buzzed in the corner of the narrow window, blindly searching for a way out.

  I’m that fly, Bobby thought, just as trapped. A wave of wretchedness washed over her and she slumped back down, wishing in her misery that a giant fly swatter would splat down on her and end her unhappy life. Miss Watkins was waiting for an answer.

  “I don’t have any talent for teaching,” Bobby said. “I only majored in phys ed because, well, it’s what you do when you’re good at sports.”

  Hadn’t well-meaning Miss Watkins reviewed her record and seen the mediocre parade of Cs that had trailed her through college? Bobby knew she wasn’t bright. But it hadn’t mattered, so long as she could play field hockey. She’d planned to go pro. The recruiter for the U.S. National Women’s Field Hockey Team had as much as promised her a place on the squad. But who wanted a wing with a compound fracture in the right arm?

  Miss Watkins was flipping through Bobby’s academic records, a little furrow in her brow. “But just last semester you took a special graduate-level seminar—Coaching: Team versus Player.” She looked up at Bobby with a smile meant to be encouraging. “And you ‘aced’ it, as my students used to say.”

  Even the usually crisp Miss Watkins looked wilted by the heat, Bobby noticed. Her cheeks were flushed pink, and her brown curls clung damply to her temples. She had shed the lime green jacket that matched her sleeveless linen sheath. “Well, Bobby?” she asked, her voice sharp.

  Bobby shrugged. “That was a fluke,” she said impatiently. Coaching wasn’t the same as teaching, didn’t this woman know anything? Bobby’s eyes wandered to the fly, which had stopped buzzing and was walking in fruitless circles in the upper corner of the glass pane.

  Miss Watkins pushed her chair back. “Listen to me, Bobby, you’ve got to snap out of this fog of despair!” She stood up and lowered the top half of the window a few inches. Using a green punch card, she gently guided the forlorn fly to the edge of the frame. It hovered uncertainly an instant, and then zoomed off into the world beyond. “Believe me—you’re not out of the game yet!” She sat back down and pushed the green punch card toward Bobby. “Do you recognize this?”

  “No,” said Bobby, tearing her eyes away from the fly’s flight to freedom to look at the punch card. “What is it?”

  “It’s the Spindle-Janska Personality Penchant Assessment I administered last week. It’s one of the most respected diagnostic tools a career counselor has at her disposal. Do you want to hear the results?” Without waiting for an answer, the vocational counselor opened a folder and began reading. “Subject has discipline and focus in the highest degree. Reductive communication this subject’s strong suit. Charisma combined with a strong sense of command make this subject ideal for high-ranking military office, guru, or high school principal.”

  “That can’t be me!” Bobby gasped in disbelief. “I’m just your typical athlete, all brawn, no brains. Are you sure you haven’t mixed my test results with someone else’s?”

  “Bobby, Bobby,” chided Miss Watkins, “you’ve got to lose this insecurity complex you’ve built up about your brains. Who captained the Spitfires to victory the past two years? Who was voted ‘Most Inspirational’ by the Midwest Regional Women’s Field Hockey League? You earned those honors with more than muscles! Everything in your records shows that you’re exceptionally suited to help girls learn new skills!”

  Bobby’s mind was whirling. “Help girls learn new skills”—that certainly described her love life, but she’d never made the connection between that impulse and the pedagogy courses she’d barely passed. “But my grades—my brains—” Bobby struggled to express herself. “A teacher has to be smart.” How she’d sweated over those lesson plan assignments in Pedagogy II, how lost she’d felt when the class discussed the pros and cons of module-based teaching!

  “I won’t pretend your grades and test scores aren’t a hurdle you’ll have to overcome,” Miss Watkins admitted. “They’ll be the first thing your future employers see. But what we counselors are learning is that they’re not always a sound indication of future success in a given field. Quite frankly, I think the real problem is your lack of confidence.”

  Bobby sat still, stunned by the vocational counselor’s uncanny perception. She might have fooled her teachers and her teammates with her breezy bravado, but Miss Watkins seemed to see straight through the facade, through to the Bobby who feared that people would discover the depths of her dumbness, that without a position in professional field hockey, she would end up another sports hero has-been, handing out towels at the YMCA, cooking beans over a hot plate in some residential hotel.

  “As it happens,” Miss Watkins was continuing, as she riffled through the pile of folders on her desk, “I know a school in need of a physical education instructor, and I think my recommendation and your Elliott College degree will counterbalance those Cs you’re so concerned about. Here.” She pushed a brochure at Bobby. Bobby picked it up, reading the words “We Mold Character” over a picture of a green square of lawn surrounded by gothic gray stone buildings.

  “It’s called the Metamora Academy,” Miss Watkins continued. “It’s a small school, rather exclusive. I think you’ll do well there.”

  Bobby flipped through the brochure, skimming the descriptions of the “highly trained staff” and “unique educational aids.” She tried to picture herself leading a bevy of exclusive girls through a module on kinetics. Was she really capable of such a thing?

  “Shall I give the Headmistress a call?” Without waiting for Bobby’s answer, Miss Watkins picked up the phone and dialed.

  Now, three months later, as Bobby leaned on the windowsill of her new home, the picture from the brochure had come to life. Before her lay the quiet green quadrangle, surrounded by gothic gray stone buildings, crisscrossed with flagstone pathways. It was a tranquil scene. The only movement came from a tall, thin girl in a gray skirt and blazer with red piping—the Metamora uniform. She crossed the square of grass, paused a moment by a white column that p
oked up from a bed of purple flowers at the far end, before turning left and leaving Bobby’s view. Then the place was as quiet and still again as a monastery.

  Or a nunnery would be more accurate, Bobby reflected, turning back to her bed, piled high with gym tunics and jerseys. She plucked her Spitfires pennant out from under her old Spitfires uniform and, crossing to the sitting room that completed her two-room suite, she carefully tacked it up above the mantelpiece.

  Maybe Miss Watkins was right and she had a gift for teaching. Yet as Bobby unpacked, she couldn’t help wondering if this pedagogical opportunity had come too late. Ever since the accident, she felt changed, in some fundamental way. Before her fall, she could always count on her body if not her brains. But now…

  It wasn’t just her nightmares, disturbing as they were. The dizziness and the irrational fear of falling had migrated from her dreams to her waking life. Lately, even a steep staircase could leave her gasping and nauseated. She’d managed to conceal her weakness so far, but what if the students saw her in one of her bad spells? How would she maintain her authority?

  Closing her eyes she made herself remember the accident—the shadowy pool—the rippling reflections of the water on the wall—the shrieks of tipsy laughter. She felt again the wet grittiness of the diving board under her damp feet, and the slow-motion sensation of her feet slipping out from under her, her calf banging on the diving board’s edge as she fell—

  Bobby opened her eyes with a gasp, swaying dizzily, and grabbed the mantel for balance. It was hopeless. She’d thought maybe she could harden herself against the fear, exercise her willpower the way she’d exercise a weak muscle. But she only made herself dizzy and sick. She’d just have to avoid heights until this queer feeling went away.

  Bobby returned to her unpacking. Fortunately, her suite of rooms in Cornwall, the dormitory for the third form, was safely on the first floor, right by the entrance. This was so she could monitor the girls, Mona had explained. Her new duties included enforcing lights-out, censoring reading material, doling out prescribed medications, and confiscating unauthorized snacks. Mona had given her a handbook, with a daunting list of dormitory dos and donts.

  Bobby was already having trouble remembering the odd names for each class. The students weren’t called freshman and sophomores, etc, like in most high schools. At Metamora they were third formers, fourth formers, etc. Mona had written it all down for Bobby:

  Third Form = Freshmen

  Fourth Form = Sophomores

  Fifth Form = Juniors

  Sixth Form = Seniors

  A big part of the job, Mona had emphasized, was “helping the third formers acclimate themselves to boarding school life.” Would Bobby be able to buck up a homesick new student, or console a girl who’d gotten the Curse for the first time?

  Even if she wasn’t the housemother type, she did know games, physiology, kinetics, even some of the more obscure branches of ethnic dance, Bobby reminded herself as she unwrapped her lucky stick and swung it experimentally. For a moment she pretended she was back on the field with the rest of the Spitfires, in the final quarter of the game against the Bayard Blackhawks. Block that pass! Send it to Chick! Run up to position! Swing for the goal!

  The heavy clunk of her 1962 Nationals trophy falling on the floor pulled Bobby abruptly from her daydream. Swinging her stick at imaginary balls, she’d only succeeded in knocking the statuette off its perch on her desk.

  Bobby started guiltily at a knock on the door. Was it Mona, come to check on her? Or maybe the Headmistress, that Miss Craybill who had interviewed her in Bay City?

  But when Bobby opened the door, it was neither. A tall, willowy brunette leaned in the doorway, appraising the young phys ed teacher through half-closed eyes.

  Chapter Three

  Sherry in the Faculty Lounge

  “Hello,” she said in a voice that had been polished by whiskey and cigarettes. “I’m Laura Burnham—Metamora’s Art Mistress.”

  “I’m—”

  “Bobby Blanchard, our new Games Mistress, I know.” Laura uncoiled herself from the doorway and slid sinuously into the room. “Mind if I come in?”

  “Please,” Bobby said, unable to take her eyes off the brunette bombshell.

  It wasn’t just her va-va-voom figure that made the Art Mistress look as out of place in the Metamora dorm room as an orchid in an alpine meadow. Her thick brown hair was piled untidily on her head and her eyes outlined with kohl. Heavy gold hoops swung from her ears, and she wore a red-checked dress with tiny puffed sleeves. As she bent over to pick up the field hockey trophy Bobby had knocked to the floor, one sleeve slid off her shoulder, giving Bobby a tantalizing glimpse of the Art Mistress’s cleavage.

  “I’ve come to collect you for sherry hour in the faculty lounge. Mona sent me—although I’m not really the welcome-wagon type.”

  Bobby wasn’t complaining. “Sherry hour,” she said hopefully. “Does that mean…?”

  “Just sherry.” Laura dashed Bobby’s hopes for an ice-cold beer. The Art Mistress set the trophy on the bureau after reading the plaque and looked around the room at Bobby’s belongings with a kind of restless curiosity. “Miss Craybill comes from fine old teetotaling stock. Her aunt smashed bottles with Carrie Nation, or maybe she just opened the old girl’s mail. Anyway, what it boils down to is no hard liquor for us. So we lap up our sherry and pretend we like it.”

  “Well, if that’s what they’re pouring, lead me to it,” Bobby said, trying to be agreeable. “I’m looking forward to meeting the other teachers.”

  They walked out Cornwall’s front door into the sunny quadrangle. Laura pointed out buildings and classrooms in a desultory fashion. “The dorm next to yours is Manchester, where the fourth formers live. Over in Suffolk and Rutland we get the fifth and sixth formers. Essex is classrooms, with faculty quarters on the top floor.”

  Manchester, Suffolk, thought Bobby. There was something familiar about those names. Aloud she asked, “The building names, are they—” and Laura finished, “Named after the counties of England, yes. Metamora prides itself on carrying out the public-school tradition of the motherland.”

  Bobby gulped. She’d been about to ask if they were famous Metamora alumnae. Darn her ignorance!

  Laura led the way across the quadrangle, following the looping gravel walk. “The faculty lounge is there, in Kent.” Laura pointed at a kind of medieval castle covered in ivy that stood at the east end of the quadrangle. “Mona lives in Devon, the little annex to Kent, next to Dorset. The dining hall is in Dorset. Miss Craybill has an apartment on the third floor of Kent. Miss Froelich lived there too—until this spring, of course.” She glanced at Bobby. “You’ve heard about Miss Froelich?”

  “The math teacher? Mona told me she died last semester.” Bobby was craning her neck back to look up at the round tower, complete with slits for archers and a crenelated battlement, that rose from one corner of Kent. “Can you go up to the top of that tower?” Perhaps she could train herself to overcome her fear, a flight of steps at a time. But when she looked back at Laura, the other woman was staring at Bobby with an expression of shocked disdain.

  “Wouldn’t that be a tad morbid?” she asked acidly. “Climb it if you want to—I’m going to have my sherry with the others.” Before Bobby could reply, she turned on her heel and stalked up the steps to the medieval front doors.

  Is that artistic temperament? Bobby wondered. She followed in the footsteps of the moody Art Mistress, pausing to look at the white pedestal she’d seen from her window, which stood to one side of the steps, just below the tower. On closer examination it proved to be an old-fashioned sundial, worn and mossy, planted in a bed of pansies and bleeding hearts. The words “tempus fugit” were engraved around the edges.

  What’s that mean? Bobby puzzled over the foreign phrase before moving on.

  She climbed the steps to the double doors, all heavy wood and oversized wrought-iron hinges, and tugged it open. The capricious Art Mistress was nowhere in
sight, but Bobby could hear a distant hum of conversation. She followed the sound down the cool, dim corridor to another medieval door, this time with a brass plate that said FACULTY LOUNGE. Pulling it open, she wondered how the sherry was holding out.

  The faculty lounge was a spacious room with a vaulted barrel ceiling, like the dining hall of some ascetic order. The walls were paneled halfway up with dark wood, and a hoop-shaped iron chandelier hung at either end. The windows, thickly covered with ivy, let in a greenish light, giving the people grouped around the cavernous fireplace at the far end of the room the air of fish in an aquarium. Bobby went hesitantly toward them and was relieved when Mona swam forward to greet her.

  “There you are! I was afraid you’d gotten lost.” Mona had replaced her capris and blouse with a gaily striped dress and a matching bolero jacket. Bobby wondered if she ought to have changed out of her drip-dry short-sleeved blouse and navy slacks.

  Darn, I knew I needed more teacher-type clothes, she scolded herself as she told Mona, “I’m sorry if I’m late.”

  “Where’s Laura? I sent her to show you the way.”

  “She showed me as far as the building,” said Bobby diplomatically.

  “That Laura! Well, I’m glad you found us. I’ll get you a glass of sherry.” Mona bustled away leaving Bobby standing next to the teacher Mona had been talking to, a hook-nosed woman, her black hair streaked with silver.

  “I’m Bobby Blanchard, the new Games Mistress,” Bobby introduced herself.