“Walter, tell us something.”
I didn’t look up.
“Why is our nation safer and better off—socially, constitutionally, in all ways—than it was at this time yesterday?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, please. Come on.”
But I couldn’t do it, not this time. I was through, and my social-studies grade reflected it when I received my report card a month later. I didn’t mind for once. I didn’t care. I could afford this slipup, I decided, because there would probably never be another one. I wasn’t brave. I just happened to be tired.
TO OUR PARENTS, WHO JUDGED PEOPLE BY THEIR ACTIONS rather than their looks, Mr. Hulbertson was a good man, a doer of many civic-minded deeds, but to us, his sixth-grade students, whose senses remained unclouded by notions of virtue, he was an ugly man with noxious breath. But that was just our first impression. As the school year went on and contact displaced impact, a few of us, and eventually a lot of us, revised our view of him. He wasn’t ugly, he was loathsome. With his mouthful of stumpy, charred-looking gray teeth and his mildewed rag of lank black beard, he was abominable on every level, and what we’d initially thought of as his “bad breath” was neither his, we discovered, nor truly breath, since it stank not only on the exhale but slightly prior to the inhale, when a breath isn’t even a breath yet, only air.
“Forget about algebra today. It’s time we discussed something real,” he told the class a month or two into the year. He put down the chalk stick he’d been using, grabbed an eraser, and wiped the blackboard clean with an abrupt and aggressive Z-shaped stroke that loosed flecks of gray dandruff from his beard.
“Those of you who read the paper,” he said, “may have gotten wind of this already. The rest of you, I’ll catch you up. Just recently, in one of our large cities, a handsome, healthy, athletic adult man decided that he’d prefer to be a female.”
Mr. Hulbertson gave us time for questions then, but he was being premature since no one yet knew what he was talking about. When no questions were asked, he located his only stick of chalk that wasn’t a splintered, snapped-off stub (he bore down like crazy when he used the stuff) and sketched on the board an enormous drooping curve that looked like a wind sock when there’s no wind.
“I can make this whole business much clearer with a story. Sometimes a man at a restaurant or a bar will excuse himself to empty his bladder. He’ll go to the restroom. He’ll stand over a urinal. He’ll guide his penis through his open fly (let’s be mature today; not his thing, his penis) and as he’s holding it and aiming his urine stream, he’ll look down and think: this doesn’t feel like mine. Sometimes I wish I didn’t even have it. Sometimes I wish a surgeon could just remove it and give me something else that feels more … natural.”
I can’t describe the class’s reaction because I was so absorbed in mine, which was to find myself wondering—intensely, after a lifetime of barely caring—if my Levi’s were securely zipped.
Mr. Hulbertson reached out with his chalk and slashed a bold X through his penis diagram. He’d turned it from a drawing into a diagram by labeling it “Adult Male Genitalia.”
“The man wants to be a woman—he’s made his mind up. No more acting. No more masquerading. If he has to, he’ll do the surgery himself.”
Shockingly, a hand went up. It appeared at the far edge of my vision, and all I could see was the motion, not who made it. “He’d need to sterilize his knife and have a first aid kit with lots of gauze and iodine. He’d want a tube of sunburn cream for pain, but only if it was sterile and brand-new.” The voice, it turned out, belonged to Jenny Johnson, who’d been campaigning for teacher’s pet that year.
“I’m grateful. I thank you, Jenny,” the monster said. His policy was to thank her for speaking up, pretty much no matter what she said, as a way of reproaching the rest of us for cowering at our desks. “At this point in history, fortunately,” he said, “such risky procedures aren’t necessary. Specialists can perform the operation in a modern hospital environment.”
More time was bestowed on us for questions. None came. Our teacher sighed, a thin expulsion of vapor which, if it hit your face, could make your eyes sting. He shook his bulb-shaped, itchy-looking head, erased the penis diagram, and carved a fresh equation into the blackboard, the tip of his chalk stick crumbling from the pressure.
Then, without pausing, he erased the numbers.
“Screw it—I’m not in the mood for math today. Independent reading time,” he said. “I’m getting coffee in the lounge.”
Once his absence had lasted a few minutes and had begun to feel dependable, a kid named Warren said, “He dreamed that up.”
“How would you know?” a kid beside me asked him.
“Think about it. Use some common sense. There’s doctors who’ll cut off your cock if you just ask?”
The discussion ended there. Afterward, I pretended it hadn’t occurred. Then a week later, while standing in the lunch line, I got a whiff of sour, beard-stained air and felt a limp arm being laid across my shoulders. It was a left arm with a dangling hand that brushed against the breast pocket of my shirt, then inched its way between the top two buttons, across the skin of my bare chest, and tweaked my left nipple with two chapped fingertips.
“Does that feel nice?”
“Mr. Hulbertson!”
He fled.
But he came back. When we returned to school the following morning, there he was again, standing by the door, taking attendance on a clipboard with streaks of what looked like egg yolk in his beard. It appeared there was no God. This left only our parents to protect us. A troubling thought. Our parents adored the man.
Ever since kindergarten, school and home had been very different places, but during my first semester with Mr. Hulbertson they became opposite places, mirror worlds. Sometimes at dinner I’d watch my father eat while my left nipple, which had never recovered, prickled and tingled beneath my shirt. How could he just sit there cutting his steak? How could my mother just stand there boiling broccoli? How did they manage to carry on at all without somehow sensing that their oldest son had spent his day imprisoned in a classroom with someone whose hands roamed under students’ clothes?
“Has he chosen a play yet?” my mother asked me.
“It’s between My Fair Lady and Tom Sawyer.”‘
My mother was referring to Mr. Hulbertson’s annual sixth-grade musical comedy, a beloved institution in Marine. Its rehearsal and production took several months, during which normal schoolwork was suspended. The play was supposed to represent a treat for kids, a kind of grade-school graduation present. It was also considered a gift to the community, due to its lavish, semiprofessional scale. Oliver!, last year’s show, had been a hit, running for three straight sold-out nights at the historic auditorium inside Marine’s pioneer-era town hall. My family, like most families in town, attended all three shows to help recoup the cost of the spectacular. Those had been grueling, restless nights for me, tinged by a dread of the fraudulent hysteria that broke out every few minutes in the hall. Whenever someone’s rouged-up son or daughter missed a note or flubbed a line, the crowd would burst forth with crashing gaiety, stomping their feet and slapping their neighbors’ backs, while Mr. Hulbertson, visible in the wings, pantomimed a look of pained perfectionism and dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief.
“No contest,” my father said. “He’ll choose Tom Sawyer. We’re thirty miles from the Mississippi here, same basic landscape, almost the same town.”
“The same as what?” I asked.
My father looked at my mother. She read, he didn’t. “That place in Missouri, Millie.”
“Hannibal.”
“Interesting. Rhymes with ‘cannibal,’” I said. I was giving them a clue. I didn’t expect them to understand its meaning, but I wanted to get it out there in case something terrible happened later on.
After announcing the play would be Tom Sawyer, Mr. Hulbertson held tryouts for its two main roles.
“Toms should line up over here,” he told the class, “and all of you panting, blushing little Beckys should gather up close here to my left.”
An hour-long kissing competition ensued. Mr. Hulbertson called each boy to stand in front of him and had the girls step forward one by one to let the boy embrace them and to embrace him back. Through a humiliating process of personalized coaching (“Greg, lean in more,” “Diane, relax your torso,” “Brian, let’s have you stick that handsome chest out,” “Open your mouth, Kim, you’re not a snapping turtle!”), the six potential Tom-and-Becky pairs which Mr. Hulbertson deemed most “convincing” were isolated from the rest. None of the duos made sense to me. Two were composed of well-known enemies, one involved a freakish fat-and-thin match, and the other three seemed to be cruel experiments in emotional incompatibility.
Bitter scenes arose as the six couples were winnowed to a final three. Two of the Toms fell into a scuffle after having to swap their Beckys. When the fat Becky learned she wouldn’t make the cut because her kissing style, as Mr. Hulbertson said, was “hesitant and indirect,” she crossed her arms and sat down on the floor and vowed not to budge until he changed his mind. Moments later, Leslie, the class beauty, wrested herself from the arms of the delinquent whose filthy mouth she’d been urged to stick her tongue in and ran off bawling to the lavatory. Sarah, her overdeveloped, shy best friend, who remained in competition (paired with lucky me), was dispatched by our lecherous teacher to coax poor Leslie back into the torture chamber. When Sarah returned, she said Leslie wanted to talk to Paula, whom our teacher had matched with Brian, the schoolyard dreamboat, whom Leslie had a well-known crush on. Mr. Hulbertson said to Paula as she left: “Tell that brat to drag her sweet ass back here and get with the fucking program. No more crap.”
As we waited for the mission to play out, Mr. Hulbertson gazed out the window in the fashion of an irritable genius let down by a world of silly dullards. When Sarah returned—alone, no Paula—he turned on his heels like an army officer and marched into the hall, trailed by everyone but Edward, a detached Jehovah’s Witness. We gathered at the girls’ room door, whose customary guarantee of privacy our teacher chose to respect, amazingly. He knocked on it, he spoke loud words through it, but he didn’t touch its knob, even when a fight broke out behind it that was audible all through the hall. Paper towels went screaming off their racks, curses were hurled, a trash can banged a wall, and Leslie screamed, “Brian’s mine, you little witch!”
As everybody was bunching up to listen, I chanced to glance down and see my teacher’s right hand plunged into a front pocket of Sarah’s jeans. The hand wasn’t still; it was grabbing around down there, stretching and distorting the tight denim. I lifted my gaze to Sarah’s face, which seemed to be in the process of disappearing. Her eyes, squeezed shut, were little wrinkled patches, her cheeks were skin stuck flat to bone, and her nose had shriveled into a pink bump.
The door to the girls’ room opened and the Beckys stepped forth as if nothing had happened, like perfect friends, though Leslie was pressing a bloodstained clump of toilet paper tight against her nostrils. Mr. Hulbertson spread his arms. They let him hug them. They walked back to the classroom as a trio. Then the kissing tournament resumed. I was cut in the end, demoted from Tom to Huck, but I knew by then a lead role would probably require many hours of special rehearsal alone with the director, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Two decades later, the night before the funeral, my mother sat in her kitchen and described to me Mr. Hulbertson’s last day as a teacher. Responding to a complaint filed by a female student’s mother, a deputy sheriff showed up in his classroom and asked him into the hallway for a chat. When he returned, he crossed behind his desk to one of the tall windows that faced the playground, heaved it open, vaulted over the sill, and took off running past the jungle gyms toward the parking lot. Ten minutes later, a mile west of town, on the hill where the Soo Line freight trains ran, a diesel locomotive hit its brakes too late to avoid destroying the compact car parked in the middle of the tracks.
My mother predicted the funeral would be crowded and that the cause of Mr. Hulbertson’s suicide, and even the fact that it was a suicide, would probably go unmentioned—“To spare his memory.” Then I shared with her some of my own memories, as well as my disgust with my hometown. I suspect that such conversations were common that day, but I don’t know. Perhaps the silence held. In any case, like most of my old classmates, I skipped the service. My mother reported afterward that even more people attended than she’d anticipated and that the mood had been one of relief, of finally putting to rest a tortured soul. I set down my cup of coffee as she said this, rose from the kitchen table, left the house, and walked a few blocks to the town hall, a two-story white clapboard building with a bell tower, where I’d performed in Tom Sawyer as an eleven-year-old. Its doors were locked, both front and back, but I was able to climb over a gate and mount a staircase on the building’s south side which led to a third door fitted with a window. I looked into the empty auditorium, at the century-old painted curtain in the front which depicted a summer river scene of paddlewheel steamboats sailing up a channel lined with leafy, overhanging trees. I thought back to the night I’d stood behind the curtain, huddling in the wings with Mr. Hulbertson as two of our class’s strongest boys tugged hand over hand on a stout rope, revealing, in one continuous, long motion, an audience made up of everyone I knew. Their faces were smiling, their postures straight and patient, and on their laps and in their hands were white paper programs printed with all of our names.
Thrilling. Astonishing. It couldn’t help but be.
Then my teacher touched one of my shoulders and I flinched.
“Tonight,” he whispered to me and those around me as we peered out through our makeup at our town, “be proud of yourselves. That’s all I ask. Is everyone ready?”
We touched our costumes, nodded.
“Terrific,” he said. “Now go put on a show!”
MY FATHER HAD A SPELL. HE QUIT 3M. HE DECIDED America’s future lay out West, moved the family to Phoenix in a U-Haul, flew off to Tampa to watch his own dad die, lost weight, lost his marbles, opened the Yellow Pages, turned to a page headed “Churches,” and called the Mormons. They came over right away. They came in the form of a pair of clean-cut missionaries with clip-on neckties and wrinkle-free white shirts. They asked us to kneel. They asked us to do a lot of things. There were also some things they asked us not to do. For me, the main one was to not touch myself. When we understood all the instructions, we were baptized. Then, a month later, my father bought some wine, which was one of the things he’d been asked not to do. His attitude was: “The Hell with it.” Ours was: “Oh, God, what’s going to happen now?” especially after my father lost his new job and called the Mayflower moving people. They parked a semitrailer in front of our house and loaded it full of our belongings, but my father couldn’t tell them where to take them. He couldn’t decide where we should move. He said he had a good feeling about Idaho, but he also retained a fondness for Minnesota. The Mayflower people grew impatient, padlocked the trailer that held our stuff, detached the cab, and drove the cab away.
We lay on the floor of our empty house in sleeping bags while my father discussed his options. He only discussed them with himself. If someone else chimed in, he cut him off. The only times he left the house were to stand on the lawn and stare at the long trailer or walk around it in slow, deliberate circles, as though considering his options. My mother consoled herself with her Book of Mormon and quoted verses from it to my brother and me when we showed signs of panicking. Seeing her try to hold our family together, I realized I’d never appreciated her plight as the lonely bearer of aspirations for a more refined existence. When we’d first moved to Marine, she’d taught herself French in her spare time, progressing from a series of cassette tapes to translations of Peanuts comic books to, after no more than a year or so, works by Voltaire, Balzac, and Camus. She repeated the feat with Italian la
ter on, without neglecting her housework or her nursing career. And her interests also ran to subjects other than literature. Now and then I’d catch her in an armchair reading a popular history of philosophy by Will and Ariel Durant, and once, stacked high on the floor beside her bed, I found a complete edition, in many volumes, of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, its pages abundantly marked by strips of paper covered in minutely lettered comments. Her feats of amateur scholarship were purely private, though, and they went undiscussed with the neighbors or the rest of us, though I sensed that she hoped they’d rub off on us someday, and especially on me.
I was an eighth grader during our time in Phoenix, but only technically, since I rarely attended school in those strange months. I did, though, participate in a spelling bee. I memorized a booklet of tricky words which competitive spellers often stumbled over, won the local round, won the district round, and advanced to the final round for all of Phoenix. A lot of my rivals on the stage were Asians. Asians scared me. I’d never spoken to one. Finally there were just two of us onstage, me and an Asian girl not half my height. My word was “villain,” an easy one. I botched it. Nerves. The Asian girl didn’t botch her word. She hugged my waist. Then she was mobbed by dozens of her kin.
I had only my father there. “You had to be perfect,” he said. “You weren’t quite perfect. Sometimes there’s no in-between in life. I’m sorry.”
When I did go to school, I rarely attended class, preferring to meet up in the parking lot with a quiet Hopi friend who led me all over Phoenix on his bike, showing me where his aunts and uncles lived, shouting threats when he passed a Navajo kid, and sometimes giving me one of the blue pills he kept in a Baggie in his shorts. The pills made me mournful. Mournful, but outgoing.
Walter Kirn Page 5
