Like a crazy young dog pulling on its leash, all he wanted to do then was race down the aisle to her side and ask everything. What was her name, why she was there, where had she come from. … He held himself back though and tried to calm his mad-to-get-there spirit. He silently chanted to himself slowly, slowly—do this right.
For the first time since being hired to do this miserable job, Simon Haden was glad to be a tour guide; glad that today’s sightseeing would last hours. It was the top-dollar, see-everything, fifteen-stops, watch-your-step-getting-off-the-bus tour. Normally he loathed it. Today with this blind angel along for the ride, it would be bliss.
Not that it mattered, but he looked over the rest of the passengers on the bus. There were a few people, a few animals, two cartoon characters, and an almost six-foot-tall bag of caramels. Nothing special, nothing new. If they had been his only customers that day, it would have taken a real effort to rise to their occasion. But with the angel sitting on the aisle in row seven, he was going to enchant them all.
He picked up the bus microphone and turned it on. Blowing into it once, he heard his short puff resound throughout the bus speakers, proof that the thing was working. Sometimes it didn’t and he ended the day hoarse.
“Good morning and welcome on board.”
As one, the humans, animals, and cartoon characters smiled at him. But the giant transparent bag of beige candy shuffled impatiently in its seat. Let’s go, it appeared to be saying, let’s get this show on the road.
Haden disliked caramels. He ate a lot of candy because he had a sweet tooth, but caramels were too much work and too much trouble. Invariably they stuck in his teeth like gluey pests and had even pulled out an expensive filling when he ate one at his parents’ house. But they were very much a part of his childhood memories because his fat father loved caramels and was always eating them. His mother stationed little plates of the golden squares all around the house for her man.
“Today we’re going to try and give you a pretty good overview of the city. We’ll be starting in the center naturally and then working our way out—”
“Excuse me?”
He recognized her voice immediately and with a dazzling smile that could have lit the inside of the bus like a thousand-watt light bulb, he turned to the blind woman, ready to heed her every wish.
“Yes?”
“Is there a lavatory on this bus?”
The only way to make beauty ugly is to show it’s crazy. Like twisting the top off a jar of something wonderful to eat, the moment we’re hit by the terrible smell of it gone bad, even the hungriest person will drop the jar in the trash without a second thought.
Haden took a short quick breath as if he’d been punched in the stomach. She had already asked that question one minute ago. Was she crazy? Was all that beauty wasted because she had scrambled eggs for brains? Or maybe she just hadn’t heard his response. Was that possible? Maybe she’d been distracted or thinking about something else when he had specifically said—
He stared at her, not really knowing what to say now. And as he stared, something dawned on him. He knew this woman. We rarely forget great beauty but sometimes it does happen. He ignored her question because something in him kept saying I know her face. But where do I know it from?
The bus suddenly jolted to an abrupt stop, knocking Haden way off balance. He turned to see what had made the driver slam on the brakes like that. Through the front windshield he saw a school class of young kids being shepherded across the street by a middle-aged black woman wearing a vibrantly colored dashiki and an Afro haircut that made her head look like a round, carefully trimmed hedge. When all of the kids had crossed the street and were safely on the other side, the woman raised a hand and wriggled her fingers in thanks to the bus driver for stopping.
At first Haden didn’t recognize the woman, her Afro hairdo or dashiki; it was her wriggle. He knew that wriggle. He had lived with it for a long time at one time in his life. In a second he was absolutely sure of her. He knew the wriggle, knew the gesture, and now he knew the woman who made it.
Whipping his head around, he looked at the beautiful blind woman. He knew her too. What the hell was going on here? Why was the world too familiar to him all of a sudden?
Back a few rows, Donald Duck looked across the aisle at the cassowary and slowly raised an eyebrow. The cassowary saw it and shrugged.
“Mrs. Dugdale!” Her name fell on top of Haden’s head like a brick dropped from the roof. “She was my teacher!”
The octopus bus driver looked at him. “Who was?”
Haden pointed excitedly through the windshield in the direction of where the children had just gone. “Her—the black woman who just passed with all the kids. That was my teacher in third grade!”
The driver looked in the rearview mirror a moment at the passengers. At least half of them had slid forward in their seats expectantly, as if waiting for something important to happen.
The driver feigned indifference. “Yeah, so what? Too late for me to run over her now.”
“Let me out. I’ve got to talk to her.”
“You can’t leave now, Simon. We just started a tour.”
“Open the door. I gotta get out. Open the door!”
“They’ll fire you, man. If you walk out like this on a tour, you’re history. Don’t do it.”
“Fleam, we’re not having a discussion here, okay? Just open the damned door.” Haden was a big man with impressive muscles. Fleam Sule was only an octopus and wasn’t about to argue. It couldn’t resist flinging a last warning at the other’s back as he walked down the steps to the street. “You’re in trouble now, Simon. As soon as I tell them about this at the office, they’re going to fire you.”
Haden wasn’t listening. He didn’t even hear the door hiss shut behind him and then the bus pull away from the crosswalk. He certainly did not see all of the passengers flock to one side of the bus to see what he was going to do next. Even the blind woman was there, her cheek pressed to the cold glass, listening as someone described to her what Simon Haden was doing at that very moment.
He hurried after the children and Mrs. Dugdale. It was amazing that he had abandoned the tour and even more, his chances with the beautiful blind woman. But the moment he realized who had been leading those kids across the street, Haden knew he had to talk to her.
Because his third-grade class had been so important to him?
No.
If he’d been forced on pain of death to remember one nice thing about that year in her class, all that he would have been able to come up with was she kept a goldfish in a large round bowl on her desk that was soothing to look at.
Was it because Mrs. Dugdale herself was one of those memorable teachers who change our lives forever by example?
No.
She yelled at students or threw chalk at them whenever she felt their attention was wandering, which was most of the time. Her idea of teaching was assigning individual oral reports on what was grown in Suriname. If you were bad (and most everything was bad to Mrs. Dugdale), she made you stand interminably in a corner against what she called “The Wall of Shame.” In other words she was like too many teachers you had in elementary school. Haden had endured her moods and mediocrity and morsels of knowledge for a year and then moved up to fourth grade.
But there was one thing about her that he had never forgotten and it was why he was running after her now. In fact this one thing had played a large role in forming him. It was one of those rare childhood moments where we can look back and say without hesitation right there—that X marks the spot where something in me was changed forever.
When he was growing up, Haden had one great friend who happened to have the unfortunate name Clifford Snatzke. But Cliff was so utterly typical that he blended into life with only that odd name to distinguish him from X zillion other boys. For a while, until girls eventually became both visible and scrumptious, the two kids were inseparable. In Mrs. Dugdale’s class they sat next to each other, wh
ich made the time with her slightly more pleasant.
Right before the school year ended and report cards were sent home, Cliff became frantic that he wasn’t going to pass because he had failed too many spelling tests. He worried so much and so vocally about it that an exasperated Haden finally urged him to go see their teacher after class and just ask. After much hemming and hawing, Snatzke decided to do it—if his friend would wait for him outside the school building. Although Haden wanted to do ten other things, he agreed.
Not much in life bothered Clifford Snatzke and his face showed it. Usually he wore a slight smile or else a pleasant blankness that said he wasn’t thinking about anything special and everything was okay.
But when he emerged from the school half an hour later, his cheeks were the red that accompanies great humiliation or a bad cry. Seeing him like that, Haden eagerly asked what had happened inside. At first Cliff wouldn’t even make eye contact with his friend, much less tell the story. But eventually he did.
When he entered her classroom, Mrs. Dugdale was sitting at her desk looking out the window. Always one to mind his manners, Cliff waited until he was noticed. When she asked what he wanted, he told her in as few words as possible because all her students knew that Mrs. Dugdale liked a person to get right to the point.
But instead of looking in her grade book or giving him a lecture on how to improve his spelling, his teacher asked him what kind of name Snatzke was. He didn’t know what she was talking about but said only that he didn’t know. She asked him if he thought Snatzke was a very American name. He said he didn’t know what she meant. She looked out the window again and didn’t say anything for a long time. After a while he gently repeated his question.
Who knows why, who knows where such a thing came from in the woman, but Mrs. Dugdale then turned to this little boy and said “Get down on your knees and ask me, Clifford. Get on your knees and ask for your grade in spelling.”
Kids are dumb. They’re trusting and they have faith in what adults tell them because adults are the only authorities they have ever known. But the moment he heard this order, even dumb Clifford knew that what Mrs. Dugdale was telling him to do was both wrong and extraordinary. However he did it anyway. He got down on his knees as quickly as he could and just as quickly asked what his grade in spelling was going to be. His teacher looked at him for a few seconds and then told him to get out of her room.
That was the story. If Haden hadn’t known his friend well, he would have thought Cliff made the whole thing up. But he hadn’t. Before there was a chance to say or do anything, the front door of the school opened and Mrs. Dugdale emerged carrying her familiar brown leather briefcase. She saw the two boys, gave them a fake smile, and moved off.
Both boys looked at the ground for a long time. They couldn’t look at each other until she was gone because of their shared knowledge of what she had just done.
Simon knew he had to act. Mrs. Dugdale had done a very bad thing to his friend. But Cliff would let it slide because he didn’t have the guts to face her.
Haden did and for one of the only times in his life, he decided on the spot to do a genuinely selfless thing and right a wrong. Throwing Cliff a reassuring look, he trotted off in the direction of the faculty parking lot.
When he got there, Mrs. Dugdale was already in her Volkswagen and the engine was running. When she saw him coming toward her car she rolled the window down halfway. He would always remember that—the window went down only halfway; as if whatever he had to say was not important enough for her to make the effort to lower it further.
Going toward the VW, he felt as confident as a god about to fling a flaming lightning bolt at a sinful mortal. He was going to let her have it because, boy, did she deserve it.
“Yes, Simon? What would you like?”
He looked at her and panicked. Whatever godlike courage he’d brought to that moment fled. He could almost see it running crazily away in a zigzag across the parking lot, its ass on fire like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon. Haden loved cartoons.
“Why—,” he managed to squeeze out of his terrified lungs before starting to hyperventilate. He thought he was going to have a heart attack.
“Yes, Simon? Why what?” Her first two words were friendly; the second two were a steel trap snapping shut.
“Why—” He couldn’t breathe. His tongue had turned to stone.
“Yes, Simon?” He saw her right hand release the emergency brake. Her mouth tightened and her eyes flared when she saw he wasn’t going to say anything more and that he had delayed her unnecessarily. Desperate and terrified, he did the only thing his body could do at that moment—he shrugged. Mrs. Dugdale would have said something nasty if she hadn’t seen Clifford Snatzke walking toward them.
She didn’t even bother to roll up the window. Putting the little car in gear, she shook her head and, gunning the engine, pulled away from Haden.
On and off for the rest of his life he thought about that moment and what he should have said and done. It haunted him, as childhood memories so often do. He even dreamed about it at night sometimes. But always, even in those dreams, when his big Cinerama, Dolby sound-surround moment came to be valiant, he chickened out.
Well not this time, by God. He had been having a rough go of it recently. Maybe seeing Mrs. Dugdale on the street now for the first time in thirty years was a test. If he passed it, things would take a turn for the better. Who knows? Life could be sneaky sometimes. The lessons it taught weren’t always straightforward. Anyway, he’d like nothing more than to tell that monster what he thought of her all these years later.
As he hurried after her now, a thought blazed up in his mind like a flame flaring in total darkness: maybe many of his failures in life had been due to her and that stinking moment so long ago. If she hadn’t scared him into silence, the courage he’d had on the tip of his soul that afternoon would have emerged. For the rest of his life he would have known it was there in him and real and could be used any time he needed it.
Rather than a botched, half-assed, bill-laden, dead-end life full of microwave meals and lousy smells, Haden might have been a contender—if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Dugdale. He speeded up his pace.
A few moments after he caught sight of her, a car driving down the street lifted lazily off the pavement and took flight. It buzzed around overhead in a few circles before veering off out of sight behind an office building. Two large chimpanzees dressed like 1930s gangsters in double-breasted suits and black Borsalino hats came out of a nearby store smoking cigars, speaking Italian, and walking on their hands. Haden saw these things but paid no attention. Because Dugdale was near.
As he closed in, he touched the tops of her students’ heads as he went. Despite his preoccupation with wanting to reach his old teacher, he couldn’t help noticing how warm the children’s heads were under his hand. Like little coffee pots all of them, percolating.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Dugdale?”
Her back to him, the woman turned slowly. When she saw the adult Simon Haden standing two feet away, her eyes did not ask who are you? They said I know who you are—so what?
“Yes, Simon, what would you like?”
Aaaugh, the exact same words she had said to him thirty years ago in the parking lot! The same unsympathetic expression on her face. Nothing had changed. Not one thing. He was almost forty but she was still looking at him as if he were a bad piece of fruit at the market.
Fuck that. His moment had come. Now was the time to act decisively. Now was the time to say something brilliant and important to show her who was boss.
Because he was in such a state of shock at her familiar words, Haden did not see that all of Mrs. Dugdale’s students were frozen in place, staring at him with keen anticipation. Nor did he notice that essentially the whole world around him had come to a standstill because it too was waiting to see what he would do next. Oh sure, cars moved along the street and flies buzzed their mad circles in the air. But all of them—the flies, the drivers
in the cars, the molecules in their lungs—everything and everyone had turned to Simon Haden to witness what he would do next.
He made to speak. We must give the man that. Stirring words came to him, perfectly right for the moment. The right words, the ideal tone of voice. He was all ready to go. He made to speak but then discovered he no longer had a mouth.
He worked his mouth up and down, or rather the skin on his face where his mouth had previously been. It stretched, it moved, but that was only because it was skin and he was working the muscles beneath it. Muscles that should have controlled a mouth but he did not have one anymore. He had only skin there—smooth flat skin like the long expanse on a cheek.
He put both hands up to touch it but that only confirmed what he already feared—no mouth. Unwilling to believe what they felt, his fingers kept groping around there as if they were searching for a light switch in the dark.
He glanced at Mrs. Dugdale. Her expression made that terrible moment worse. Scorn. The only thing on her face was scorn. Scorn for Haden, scorn for his cowardice, and scorn for whomever he was now in her eyes. He was reliving his thirty-year-old moment of truth with her in the school parking lot. And this time he would have prevailed if he’d only had a mouth.
But he didn’t. Frantically he slapped the space on his face where a mouth should have been. While doing that he glared at this woman, this villain in an Afro who was winning again. The only weapon he had to use now was his eyes. But eyes are not meant for this kind of warfare. A dirty look doesn’t have the firepower, the megatonnage a ripping good sentence does.
Somewhere in a far corner of his mind, Haden knew that he had been here before, right smack in the middle of this moment and exact situation, mouthless. But his fury and exasperation combined brushed aside this déjà vu. So what if he had been here before—he still had to handle it now. Still had to find a way to defeat Dugdale and show her that he was not the idiot her mocking eyes said he was.
Desperation growing, he looked around for something, anything that he could use. His eyes fell on a little girl. Her name was Nelly Weston and she was one of Mrs. Dugdale’s students. The girl was tormented too often by the teacher for being too slow, too sloppy, too dreamy for Dugdale’s liking.
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