Ms. Hempel Chronicles

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Ms. Hempel was moved, but knew that affable, although a vocabulary word, was not synonymous with good. She was not a good teacher, yet teaching had rendered her unfit for everything else: She was not a good friend (she didn’t return phone calls), nor a good lover (a student’s smiling face would suddenly materialize before her, mid-coitus), nor a good citizen (she didn’t have time to read up on the propositions before she went to vote). She had chosen teaching because it seemed to offer both tremendous opportunities for leisure and the satisfaction of doing something generous and worthwhile. Too late she realized her mistake; teaching had invaded her like a mild but inexorable infection; her students now inhabited her dreams, her privacy, her language. She found herself speaking as they did; anything cheap or worn or disappointing was ghetto: I’m so sick of this ghetto answering machine! she would exclaim to her empty apartment. Anything extreme was mad: The food here is mad expensive! she would say,

  examining a menu. No doubt she used liberally to indicate her emphatic agreement. Her one comfort was the mutuality of the exchange, for they, without realizing it, had adopted her mannerisms as well. Once she overheard Michael Reggiani refer fondly to Julius Garcia Jonson as irredeemable. Or when Kia Brown was sent back to the end of the lunch line, she said, I’m so cross! But really, victory was theirs; they had taken the castle and hung their flag from the turret; they had corrupted even her impeccable spelling. Ms. Hempel, crowned Grammar Queen of her junior high, now found herself confusing there and their,; and inserting apostrophes where they didn’t belong. It was a war of attrition; even the most egregious mistakes, seen over and over again, can begin to assume the appearance of correctness.

  She put e before i. She bought blue nail polish; she felt tenderly toward the same boys whom her girls singled out as crush-worthy. Earlier that day, during after-school detention, Jonathan Hamish had reached out and grabbed her hand. She was teasing him; he wanted to make her stop. Briefly, stickily, his fingers closed over hers, and her heart jumped.

  She had given him and Theo McKibben detention because they had traded punches during class; affectionate punches, not malicious ones, but she had already warned them. So she said, amiably, as she always did, “I’ll see you guys after school.” But it turned out that Jonathan and Theo were in far deeper trouble; only the day before they had had an encounter with the police. Joined by some other unmanageable boys, they had harassed the pizza-parlor owner on Seventh Avenue, rattling his garbage cans and pressing their faces against his windows. It was an act of vengeance; he had banished them after they’d showered a booth with Parmesan cheese. But he telephoned the police, and when the cruiser pulled up to the

  curb, the boys had already fled, with the exception of Theo, who was trusting and moonfaced and slow.

  “Is this true what I hear?” Ms. Hempel asked when the boys showed up to serve their detention, and at first reluctantly, then with increasing gusto, they told her the story, interrupting themselves to insist upon their blamelessness: “We just spilled a little cheese—” “Maybe I bumped into one of the trash cans on the way out—” "Everybody knows that he hates kids—” And they looked so earnest, so indignant, that she couldn’t help but tease them. Ms. Hempel frowned; she pursed her eyebrows; she rolled her eyes. “Sure, sure,” she said. “Wrongfully accused. The two of you would never dream of doing something like that.” It was at that moment Jonathan’s hand shot out and landed upon her own, resting on the desk. “It’s true!” he said, and immediately it disappeared again; the protestations continued. He thought nothing of it, she was sure; it was just another one of those bodily convulsions she so often witnessed—an impulse, a thoughtless intimacy, as when her students, lost in concentration during a test, confused by a question, needing help, would raise their hands and ask her, “Mom?”

  Jonathan Hamish was not at the talent show; he wouldn’t be caught dead. He was the toughest, craziest kid in the eighth grade. He would have been expelled already if his mother hadn’t been the French teacher, with dark rings beneath her beautiful eyes and fluffy hair pinned up with a pencil. Ms. Hempel knew a lot about Jonathan even before he became one of her students: his unpredictable violence, his cruelty to the weak and maladjusted. “You can see it in his eyes,” said Mr. Radovich, the sixth-grade math teacher. “He’s not the same as other bad kids.” Jonathan’s eyes were pale blue, with the same charcoal smudges beneath them: he had difficulty sleeping

  at night and would gallop up and down the apartment hallways, slapping his palms against the walls. His father played the romantic leads in Noel Coward comedies and was gay. According to his mother, Jonathan was terrified lest anyone should know; he played four different sports and said faggot regularly. But he loved his father and would run up to him proudly, and shyly, whenever Mr. Hamish found time to sit in the bleachers and watch his games.

  Jonathan took two different medications three times a day. It was easy to tell when he had missed a dose. His eyes would glitter; he would tip his chair until the front legs rose six inches into the air; his pencil would erupt out of his hand. Ms. Hempel learned that unless she kept him busy at all times, he would needle his neighbors, shout out Homer Simpson impressions, eat sugar packets stolen from the lunchroom, fall back in his chair and crack his skull open. So her questions were frequently directed at him, and she always gave him parts to read in class. It was unfair, she knew; she saw the hands frantically quivering in the air, the look of constipation on her students’ faces. But they understood, and she loved them for it. They confirmed her hunch that children, despite their reputation to the contrary, had great powers of sympathy.

  Powers that Jonathan, too, possessed. His heart went out to the characters in the books they read. He loved Lennie, the lumbering and deadly giant, and would flare up whenever a classmate referred to the character as retarded. He also loved Mercutio. “He’s a wiseass, but he’s a good friend,” Jonathan said, and when they watched the movie, he murmured, “Mercutio’s the man" He had no patience, however, for Holden Caulfield. "He’s just a mess,” Jonathan said. “I’m sick of him messing up everything he does. He needs to get his act together.” Jonathan's disgust was such that he made it difficult to continue the discussion. He snorted and interrupted: “He’s a loser! When are we going to be done talking about this stupid book and this stupid guy?” Ms. Hempel was surprised; she had hoped Jonathan would like Holden, might see in him a kindred spirit. How stupid, she realized later, bent over in the faculty bathroom, sobbing, the faucet turned as far as it could go: that is precisely the reason he hates Holden Caulfield.

  All the girls loved Jonathan Hamish. They sidled up to Ms. Hempel and whispered, “You know his dad’s gay, right? It’s so sad; he can’t deal with it.” Even at the age of thirteen, they gravitated, these tenderhearted vultures, to the tortured, the afflicted, the misbehaved. They circled around him, wary but ravenous, each hoping that she would be the one who could render him gentle, that he would nuzzle softly in her palm. He was compelling to them in a way that the class jokers and malcontents and spastics could never be; he was bad in some permanent and profound way. What set him apart was his shame; he took no pleasure in his bad behavior. When his classmates gleefully recounted his misdeeds—Jonathan chucked a blueberry bagel at Mr. Kenney’s head! Jonathan got sent out of theater class for the sixteenth week in a row!—he would retract into himself, refusing to look at Ms. Hempel, his face darkening. He never felt the triumph that the other kids believed was his due. Instead, Jonathan seemed wearied by his bad behavior; the struggle that took place within him was daily and exhausting: she could see it, wracking his slight frame, leaving those ashy moons beneath his eyes. Some days he would grip the edge of his desk, his knuckles blanching, as if a fierce and implacable storm were threatening to tear him

  away. Ms. Hempel found herself touching his shoulder during class for fear of losing him, and in the hope that the weight of her hand might somehow serve as anchor.

  But he was not here at the show. Ms. Hempel’
s eyes combed through the rows of faces, though she knew she would not find him.

  Harriet now took the stage. Her cape wafted behind her as she guided her little card table into the spotlight. Harriet Reznik, precious artifact of another age! Her thick, swingy helmet of hair, the bangs that looked as if they had been cut with the help of a ruler. Her clanging lunch box. Her indifference to television. Her adventure books, whose child heroes discovered buried treasure and tumbled down waterfalls and toppled tyrannical governments. Her stories of Christmases in Canada, the tangerine peels burning in the fireplace, the giant footprints she left in the field: an experiment with a pair of ancient snowshoes. Her cousin Wilfred, with whom she made trouble and renovated a tree house and took swimming lessons in a very cold lake. Her guinea pigs, her magic tricks. She filled Ms. Hempel with wonder.

  Harriet shrugged back the satin folds of her cape and plucked from the front pocket of her jeans a coin, which she held up for the audience to see: “Here before you now is a quarter. A regular, normal, twenty-five-cent quarter.” Ms. Hempel smiled; Harriet Reznik—exuberant soul, mischief maker, jumper up and down—did not like speaking in front of crowds. She kept her eyes fastened on the quarter; she spoke in the breathless, uninflected rush of small children reciting poetry. “Before your very eyes, I will make this quarter disappear." She waved the coin mechanically above her head, as if spraying a room with insect repellent. “Disappear into thin air,” she repeated, and gulped. Her wrist flicked; her hand

  curled into itself; the cape shivered. Then, miraculously, the coin was gone. Blinking rapidly, Harriet held her palm out for the audience to examine: “Behold! No more quarter.” She checked her hand as if she did not quite believe it herself, and for the first time she smiled. “No quarter!” She patted the air with her outstretched palm, and the audience clapped. A claque of girls in the front row shrilled. "Now, watch closely” And Harriet Reznik tightened her fingers into a tube, pressing them against her eye like a telescope. “Empty?” She presented the spy hole for the audience to peer through. "Nothing in there?” She righted her fist, so that the telescope transformed back into her hand, gripping a fat bouquet of invisible flowers. With the unemployed hand she dipped into the fist, from which she extracted, in a single fluid gesture, a length of red silk. It floated in her fingers. “Magic," Harriet Reznik said.

  “I bet she’s going to be gay when she grows up,” Mimi Swartz, the head of the art department, had once predicted. Mimi was gay, too. And Harriet certainly was different from all the other girls in the seventh grade; she was without fear, utterly uninterested in the opposite sex, never betraying even the smallest flicker of self-consciousness. She fancied herself an incorrigible troublemaker. Ms. Hempel went to great lengths to encourage her in this role: “Harriet Reznik, why do you plague me so?” she would exclaim, rolling her eyes up toward the heavens. Harriet liked to dart into Ms. Hempel’s office during recess and distract her from her grading. “Harriet Reznik, you are the bane of my existence!” Ms. Hempel would say, and Harriet would cackle delightedly. She had a battery of pranks—finger traps, squirt rings, fake rattlesnake eggs—all of which she practiced upon Ms. Hempel. "Want some gum, Ms. Hempel?” she'd coo, offering a piece encased in a suspiciously generic wrapper. Her teacher would reach out her hand, allow it to hover over the stick of gum, and then after a moment had passed, plant both fists on her hips: “Are you crazy? I know the way that mind of yours works!” Ms. Hempel would exhale, as if she had just had a close call. “Harriet Reznik,” she would say, eyes narrowing. “I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you.”

  But she didn’t like to think of Harriet Reznik being gay. Not because she had any misgivings about gayness; she just didn’t like to think of Harriet becoming a grown-up. A selfish, terrible part of her didn’t want to see any of her kids get bigger. Yes, she wanted to see Adelaide emerge from the wings, as luminous as a moonbeam. Yes, she wanted Jonathan to sleep well; she wanted Edward Ashe to travel the world, blowing on his didgeridoo, adopting rare reptiles and spiders wherever he went. She wanted to see Harriet Reznik make whole elephants disappear. But Ms. Hempel couldn’t bear to think of them not being exactly as they were now, as she knew them. She wanted them to stay in middle school forever.

  Ms. Hempel had once believed, foolishly, that teachers liked to watch their students grow up. She had written letters to the teachers she loved most, to tell them of her progress, her becoming. Upon graduating from college, she had even telephoned Mr. Mellis, who had taught her creative-writing class in the eleventh grade. “I’m going to be a teacher, too!” she announced breathlessly over the phone. She waited for his ecstatic reply. The silence hissed over the long-distance connection. “Well,” he said, finally. “If you ever had a novel in you, Beatrice, it’s certainly not going to come out now.” And now she sat here, in her brown lipstick, on a folding chair, and wondered: would she ever write a novel, or sing in a band, or foment a revolution?

  A volunteer hoisted himself up onto the stage. He was a father, but one whom Ms. Hempel didn’t recognize. Tall and homely, he stooped down, as if longing to be the same compact size as Harriet Reznik, but she shot him a forbidding look and fanned the cards brusquely in his face. “Pick a card, any card,” she commanded. The father danced his hand over the splayed cards Harriet held before him. "Do not, at any cost, show me the card you have chosen,” she said. He extracted a card from the fan and held it to his chest. “Study your card. Memorize it.” He did as she told him. “Once you are absolutely sure you have memorized the card, you may show it to the audience.” The father shielded his eyes and slowly rotated his outstretched arm from one side of the auditorium to the other, displaying his selection. Parents, kids, teachers, all leaned forward at once. A six of spades. Ms. Hempel heard a little boy somewhere behind her whisper it to himself. “You may replace the card,” Harriet Reznik said. Frowning deeply, she shuffled the deck, cut it, stirred the cards around on her little card table. Then, abruptly, she swept them into a pile and rapped them against the heel of her palm. After placing the deck in the center of her table, she waited, face straining; she seemed to count silently to ten. The magic book’s instructions must have included, Ms. Hempel realized, this moment of suspense. Now Harriet Reznik was ready to continue. “Is this,” she asked, delicately tweezing a card off the top of the pile, “your card?" With an uncharacteristic flourish, she snapped back her cape. The audience gasped. The father’s mouth opened and closed.

  It was not his card. The card that Harriet Reznik held before her was not the six of spades; it was the eight of diamonds.

  The father paused. Lie! Just lie! Ms. Hempel willed him to do it: Lying won’t kill you. But then, with terrible reluctance,

  he shook his head. Harriet Reznik looked stunned; she flipped over the card, stared at it; she peered closely at the father: "Are you sure?” She asked it very politely. Ms. Hempel, sitting on her plastic chair, wanted to be someplace far away, and to take Harriet Reznik, cape trailing, along with her. She folded her program into smaller and smaller squares. The father looked searchingly into the wings, as if hoping some benevolent figure offstage might come out and rescue him. Harriet, with painful concentration, returned the wrong card to the top of the pile. "You can sit dow'n now,” she said.

  The father walked out to the edge of the stage and bent down so that he could ease himself off He seemed anxious to return to his seat, to the child waiting for him there. “Hold on!” Harriet Reznik shouted. The audience sat up; the man stopped, mid-crouch. "Wait!” she cried. “What’s sticking out of your back pocket?” The father straightened, bewildered, and turned to face her. As he did so, Ms. Hempel saw that Harriet was right: there was something square, and stiffj protruding from his rear pocket. “Is that one of my cards?” Harriet asked. It was. The six of spades.

  The entire auditorium shuddered. “Oh god!” the little boy said, involuntarily. “Oh god! Oh god!” The applause was thunderous. Parents clutched at each other and hollered, utterl
y without embarrassment. Kids cupped their hands over their mouths and sounded long, keening cries. Up onstage, standing behind her card table, Harriet Reznik gleamed. “Just wait till you see the next one!” she shouted over the noise.

  Suddenly there was a wild rustling. From beneath her little table, from inside a cardboard box punctured with holes, Harriet Reznik coaxed a bird: not a dove, or some other mild-mannered sort, but a glossy and muscular crow. It cawed loudly. It flapped its enormous wings. It tipped over its box,

  struggled out of Harriets grip, and took flight. The audience inhaled, their heads craning as they followed its path around the auditorium, black wings beating the air. The crow swooped low; boys reached up to catch ahold of it; Mrs. Willoughby took shelter beneath her program; adults tucked the heads of small children under the crooks of their arms; Mr. Radovich barreled toward the emergency exit; Harriet Reznik stood onstage, mouth agape, marveling at what she had unleashed. Ms. Hempel watched it glide toward her—shiny feathers, hoarse call—and lifting up an arm, she stretched out her fingers: she | touched it!_

  Accomplice

  It wasn’t even Halloween yet, but Ms. Hempel was already thinking about her anecdotals. The word, with all its expectations of intimacy and specificity, bothered her: a noun in the guise of an adjective, an obfuscation of the fact that twice a year she had to produce eighty-two of these ineluctable things. Not reports, like those written by other teachers at other schools, but anecdotals: loving and detailed accounts of a student’s progress, enlivened by descriptions of the child offering a piercing insight or aiding a struggling classmate or challenging authority. It was a terrible responsibility: to render, in a recognizable way, something as ineffable as another human being, particularly a young one. On average she would spend an hour writing about each child, and then waste up to another hour rereading what she had just written, in the hopes that her words might suddenly reveal themselves as judicious. But too often Ms. Hempel’s anecdotals reminded her of those blurry portraits from photography’s early days: is that a hand I see? A bird? The sitter has squirmed, readjusted her skirts, swatted at a fly: she is no longer a child, but a smudge of light. This is how Ms. Hempel’s students appeared, captured in her anecdotals: bright and beautiful and indistinct.