Ms. Hempel Chronicles

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  The cubicle where she now sat, peeling an orange, would in less than two months, become a Faculty Work Station. Other faculty members would sit in the work stations next to hers; they would peer over and say, "Don’t kill yourself You’re not writing a novel.” But now there was only Mr. Polidori, humming faintly and balancing equations.

  The science and math teachers had it easy. During anecdotal season, Ms. Hempel would berate her younger, student self: she never should have turned away from the dark and gleaming surfaces of the lab. She had chosen instead the squishy embrace of the humanities, where nothing was quantifiable and absolute, and now she was paying for all those lovely, lazy years of sitting in circles and talking about novels. Mrs. Beasley, the head of the math department, had perfected an anecdotal formula: she entered the student’s test scores, indicated whether his ability to divide fractions was “strong," “improving,” or “a matter of concern,” and then ended with either congratulations or exhortations, whichever seemed more appropriate. The formulaic would not do, however, for an English teacher. Ms. Hempel could not complain of a child's limited vocabulary or plodding sentences without putting on a literary fireworks display of her own. Because there was always that skepticism: students who didn’t quite believe that she could do all the things that she required of them (vary your sentence structure—incorporate metaphors—analyze, not summarize!), as if she were a fleshy coach who relaxed on the bleachers while the team went panting around the gym.

  So the anecdotals must be beautiful. But she didn’t want them to sound florid, or excessive. She didn’t want to sound insincere. (Oh, superlatives! Ms. Hempel’s undoing.) She wanted to offer up tiny, exact, tender portraits of the children she taught, like those miniature paintings that Victorians would

  keep inside their lockets along with a wisp of hair. And though she would fail to do so every time, she had not resigned herself to failure, could not experience that relief; every December and every May she would sit down to write, dogged by the fear that she would misrepresent a child, or that through some grievous grammatical error, some malapropism, some slip, she would expose herself, that she would by her own hand reveal the hoax.

  “If I started my anecdotals this afternoon, I would have to write only one and a half a day. That sounds manageable.” “Recycle,” Mr. Polidori said from the depths of his cubicle. “I do recycle,” Ms. Hempel said. “I make my kids recycle, too.”

  Mr. Polidori’s face appeared above her. “Use your anecdotals from last year. Just insert new names—if you go under Edit, then slide your arrow down to Replace, it’s quite straightforward.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I can’t do it. Because the material is all new this year. They’re not reading The Light in the Forest anymore. Or April Morning. But it’s a wonderful idea.” This possibility had never occurred to her.

  For the new seventh-grade curriculum, Ms. Hempel picked a book that had many swear words in it. She felt an attraction to swear words, just as she did to cable television, for both had been forbidden in her youth. Her father had considered swear words objectionable on the grounds of their very ordinariness. “Everyone uses the same old expletives over and over again,” he said. “And you are not everyone.” He grasped her cranium gently in one hand and squeezed, as if testing a cantaloupe at the farmers market. “Utterly unordinary,” he declared.

  But to Ms. Hempel, swear words were beautiful precisely because they were ordinary, just as gum snapping and hair flipping were beautiful. She once longed to become a guni-snapping, foulmouthed person, a person who could describe every single thing as fucking and not even realize she was doing it.

  In this, she never succeeded. When she read This Boy’s Life, when she saw shit and even fuck on the page, she quietly thrilled. Then she ordered copies for the seventh grade.

  “First impressions?” she asked, perched atop her desk, her legs swinging. “What do you think?”

  The seventh graders looked at each other uneasily. They had read the opening chapter for homework. A few stroked the book’s cover, of which they had already declared their approval; it was sleek and muted. Grown-up. A cover that promised they were venturing into new territory: no more shiny titles, endorsements from the American Library Association, oil paintings of teenagers squinting uncertainly into the distance.

  “Do you like it?” Ms. Hempel tried again. She smiled entreatingly; her shoes banged against her desk. Teaching, she now understood, was a form of extortion; you were forever trying to extract from your students something they didn’t want to part with: their attention, their labor, their trust.

  David D’Sousa, ladies’ man, came to her assistance. Even though he was a little chubby and overcurious about sex, he was a very popular boy in the seventh grade. He had gone out with a lot of girls. He walked down the hallways with the rolling, lopsided gait of the rappers he so fervently admired. In the classroom his poise deserted him; he sputtered a lot, rarely delivering coherent sentences. He batted away his ideas just as they were escaping from his mouth.

  But David was a gentleman, and ready to sacrifice his own dignity in order to rescue Ms. Hempel’s. Cooperative and responsive, she thought. Willing to take risks.

  “It’s like ..." he began, and stopped. Ms. Hempel smiled at him, nodding furiously, as if pumping the gas pedal on a car that wouldn’t start. “It’s ...” He grabbed his upper lip with his bottom teeth. He ground his palm into the desk. The other kids delicately averted their eyes; they concentrated on caressing the covers of their books. “It’s ... different from the other stuff I’ve read in school.”

  The class exhaled; yes, it was different. They spoke about it as if they didn’t quite trust it, particularly the boys, as if there was something inherently suspicious about a book whose characters seemed real. Toby, for example—the narrator. He wanted to be a good kid, but couldn’t stop getting into trouble; he loved his mother a lot, but wasn’t above manipulating her into buying things that he wanted—it was all uncannily familiar. They were also puzzled by the everyday nature of his struggles: there was no sign that soon Toby would be surviving on his own in the wilderness, or traveling into the future to save the planet from nuclear disaster.

  “It doesn’t really sound like a book,” said Emily Radinsky, capricious child, aspiring trapeze artist, lover of Marc Chagall. Ms. Hempel would write, Gifted.

  “I normally don’t like books,” said Henry Woo, sad sack, hanger-on, misplacer of entire backpacks. Ms. Hempel would write, Has difficulty concentrating.

  “It’s okay for us to be reading this?” said Simon Grosse, who needed to ask permission for everything. Ms. Hempel would write, Conscientious.

  On Parents’ Night, Ms. Hempel felt fluttery and damp. She knew from past experience that she would make a burlesque of herself, that her every sentence would end with an exclamation point, and her hands would fly about wildly and despair-ingly, like two bats trapped inside a bedroom. The previous year, a boy named Zachary Bouchet had reported, “My mother says that you smile too much.”

  In the faculty room, Mr. Polidori threw an arm around her and whispered, “Just pretend they’re naked.”

  That was the last thing Ms. Hempel wanted to imagine. Instead, she decided to picture her own parents sitting in front of her. She pictured her mother, who would make them late because she had misplaced the car keys; and her father, who would station himself in the front row and ask embarrassing questions. Embarrassing not in their nature, but embarrassing simply because he had asked them. Her father liked to attract attention. “M hao ma!" he would greet the waiters at the Chinese restaurant. "Yee-haw!” he would whoop at the fourth-grade square dance recital. "Where’s the defense?” he would wail from the sidelines of soccer games. “Brava! Brava!” he would sing out, the first to rise to his feet. Ms. Hempel, as a child, had received several standing ovations, all induced by her beaming, cheering, inexorable father.

  Each of these parents, Ms. Hempel told herself, is as mortifying as mine were.

&n
bsp; A mother began: “This book they’re reading—I was just wondering if anyone else was troubled by the language.”

  Ms. Hempel smiled bravely at the instigator. “I’m glad you brought that up,” she said, and reminded herself: This woman can never find her car keys. This woman is always running late.

  A classroom of parents, squeezed into the same chairs that their children occupied during the day, looked at Ms. Hempel. She couldn’t say, Your kids are okay with me. I promise. Instead, she said, "When I chose this book, I was thinking of The Catcher in the Rye. Because every time I teach Catcher to the eighth grade, I feel like I’m witnessing the most astonishing thing. It’s like they’ve stuck their finger in a socket and all their hair is standing on end. They’re completely electrified. What they’re responding to, I think, is the immediacy and authenticity of the narrator’s voice. And part of what makes Holden sound authentic to them is the language he uses. This book’s impact on them is just—immeasurable. Even the ones who don’t like to read, who don’t like English. It suddenly opens up to them all of literature’s possibilities. Its power to speak to their experiences.”

  Ms. Hempel paused, surprised. She had recovered.

  “I thought to myself, Shouldn’t the seventh grade get the chance to feel that? That shock of recognition?”

  And she meant it, in a way, now that she had to say it. What happened then? Ms. Hempel doubted it had anything to do with her speech. Perhaps an insurgency had been building quietly against the concerned mother, who probably hijacked Parent Association meetings, or else was always suggesting another bake sale. Maybe they heard in her complaint an echo of their own parents, or they believed on principle that words could never be dirty. Maybe sitting in the plastic desk-chairs reminded them of what school felt like.

  One after another, the parents began describing their children: She talks about it at dinner. He takes it with him into the bathroom. You don’t understand—the last thing that she enjoyed reading was the PlayStation manual.

  They spoke in wonder.

  At nights, I hear him chuckling in his bedroom. He says that he wants me to read it, that he’ll loan me his copy when he’s done. When I offered to rent the movie for her, she said that she didn’t want to ruin the book.

  “I knew it!” a father announced. "It was just a question of finding the right book.”

  And the parents nodded again, as if they had always known it, too.

  "Well done!” Another father, sitting in the back row, began to clap. He smiled at Ms. Hempel. Three more giddy parents joined in the applause.

  Ms. Hempel, standing at the front of the classroom, wanted to bow. She wanted to throw a kiss. She wanted to say thank you. Thank you.

  And then it occurred to her: perhaps what had so humiliated her about her father had made someone else—a square dancer, a waiter, the director of the seventh-grade production of Cats—feel wonderful.

  The next morning, in homeroom, Ms. Hempel helped Cilia Matsui free herself from her crippling backpack. “Your dad,” she noted, “has this very benevolent presence.”

  “Benevolent?” Cilia Matsui asked.

  Ms. Hempel always used big words when she spoke; they also appeared frequently in her anecdotals, words like acuity and perspicacious. It was all part of her ambitious schemes for vocabulary expansion. Most kids took interest in new words only if they felt they had something personal at stake. “You’re utterly depraved, Patrick,” she would say. “No, I won’t. Look it up. There’s about six of them sitting in the library.”

  So Adelaide’s comments were astute. Gloria had an agile mind. Rasheed’s spelling was irreproachable. Even those who weren’t academically inclined deserved a dazzling adjective, pavid D’Sousa, for instance, was chivalrous. These words, v|s. Hempel knew, were now permanently embedded. Even after the last layer of verbal detritus had settled, they would still be visible, winking brightly: yes, I was an iconoclastic thinker.

  Because one never forgets a compliment. “You looked pos-itively beatific during the exam,” Miss Finch, her tenth-grade English teacher, had told her. “Staring out the window, a secret little smile on your face. I was worried, to tell the truth. But then you turned in the best of the bunch.”

  Thus, beatific—blissful, saintly, serenely happy—was forever and irrevocably hers. She shared the new word with her father; she showed him the grade she had received. Aha, he said, with great vindication. Aha!

  Uncomplimentary words, however, seemed to overshadow the complimentary ones. That wasn’t it, exactly. But whereas an ancient compliment would suddenly, unexpectedly, descend upon her, spinning down from the sky like a solitary cherry blossom, words of criticism were familiar and unmovable fixtures in the landscape: fire hydrants, chained trash cans, bulky public sculptures. They were useful, though, as landmarks. Remember? she used to say to her father: Mr. Ziegler. White hair. He made us memorize Milton. And when that failed, she would say: Don’t you remember him? He was the one who called me lackadaisical.

  Her mother’s memory was terrible, but her father could always be counted on. In his neat, reliable way, he sorted and shelved all the slights she had endured. Oh yes, he’d say. Mr. Ziegler. Looking back on those conversations, she wondered if perhaps it wasn’t fair to make him revisit the unhappy scene of her high school career. Remembering old criticisms is only fun once they have been proven laughably incorrect. Fractions! the famous mathematician hoots: Mrs. Beasley said 1 was hopeless at fractions!

  When her father died, a year ago that spring, Ms. Hempel had spoken at his memorial service, along with her brother and their much younger sister. Calvin talked about a day they went hiking together in Maine, and Maggie, before she started crying, remembered how he used to read aloud to her every night at bedtime, something she still liked to do with him even though she was ten years old now and capable of reading The Hobbit on her own. Ms. Hempel’s story sounded unsentimental by comparison. She described her father picking her up from play practice, when she was maybe fourteen or fifteen. It was winter, and too cold to wait for the bus. Before parking the car in the garage, he would deposit her at the back door, so that she wouldn’t have to walk through the slush. As she balanced her way up the path, he would flick his headlights on and off. The beams cast shadows across the lawn, making everything seem bigger than it really was: the randy cat, her mother’s beloved gazebo, the fur sprouting from the hood of her parka. At the moment she reached the door, she would turn around and wave at him. She couldn’t see him, because the headlights were too bright, but she could hear him. Click, click. Click, click. Only once she stepped inside would he steer the car back out of the driveway.

  When Ms. Hempel finished speaking, she looked out at her family. They looked back at her expectantly, waiting to hear the end of the story. The last time she stood on this pulpit, many years before, she had received the same anxious look. She was the narrator for the Christmas pageant, and though she had spoken her part clearly and with dramatic flair, she forgot to say her final line: “So the three wise men followed the star of Bethlehem.” A long pause followed, and then the three wise men stumbled out of the sacristy, as if a great force had propelled them.

  For the rest of the pageant, she had to stay inside the pulpit, from where she was supposed to look down on the manger with a mild and interested expression; instead, she watched the other children wolfishly, willing someone else to make a mistake more terrible than her own. No one did. It could have happened to anyone, her mother would tell her, but she knew differently: it could have happened only to her. During her narration, she had fastened her eyes on the choir loft, but as she neared the end, in anticipation of the delicious relief that she would soon feel, she allowed her gaze to slip down onto the congregation below. There she saw her father, leaning forward very slightly, and holding on to the pewr in front of him. He was smiling at her. Hugely. She lost her bearings entirely.

  Now, standing in the same pulpit, she looked out at her family as they waited hopefully for a fi
nal paragraph. She looked at them in defiance: That’s all! He clicked the headlights on and off. The End. And she wished something that she never used to wish: that her father was there, on the edge of his pew. He would have liked the story; it would have made sense to him.

  “Is being benevolent a good thing or a bad thing?” Cilia Matsui asked.

  “A good thing!” said Ms. Hempel. “Benevolent means ‘generous and kind’.”

  “Oh yes,” Cilia said. “That sounds like my dad.”

  Dwight, Toby’s stepfather, was the character in the book whom her kids despised most. They shuddered at the humiliations that he made Toby endure: shucking whole boxes full of foul-smelling horse chestnuts, attending Boy Scouts in a secondhand uniform, playing basketball in street shoes because he wouldn’t fork out the money for sneakers. They hated him for coming between Toby and his mother. They hated him for being petty and insecure and cruel. “Dwight " they would mutter helplessly. “I want to kill the guy.”

  As Toby’s situation worsened, they would turn over their books and study the author’s photograph: his handsome, bushy mustache, his gentle eyes. “He teaches at Syracuse,” they would point out. “He lives with his family in upstate New York.”

  They loved these facts, because reading about the abusive stepdad, the failures at school, the yearnings to escape, to be someone else—it made them feel terrible. “He had such a tough life,’’ they repeated, shaking their heads. “A really tough life.”

  But, according to the back of the book, Toby prevailed. The kids saw, in the felicitous pairing of picture and blurb, a happy ending to his story: he became a writer! He didn’t turn into a drunk or a bum. The back cover promised that it was possible to weather unhappy childhoods, that it was possible to do lots of bad things and have lots of bad things done to you—and the damage would not be irreparable. Often a particularly somber discussion of Toby’s struggles would conclude with this comforting thought: “And now he’s a famous and successful writer.” Tobias Wolff.